because he addresses the same issue, what is to be done, if i could borrow the way, another important leader who poses the question, what is to be done? this is his recognition. and i think we ought to be for a moment proud that the united states produced such a person, proud that we generated someonee who could pose the reform and revolution question soeven dramatically that even though he is coming down on the side of revolution, which frightens soso many people, returns now

something we want to talk about and that we want you to return to read and learn from as we have about whether it is we face now. and we do in this country face an extraordinary structure that has done the things that were so upsetting. one example referred to by all of us, democracy in those days was a word that was akin to a chaotic, disorganized, messy, negative, negative, negative. we lived in a bizarre reversal. now it is the holy of holies. we celebrated democracy the way we celebrate cowboys in the old

days. a complete fantasy, a makeup so that we can indulge this desire as an economist i keep saying this and i know some of you have heard it from me before. we go to work. we spend five out of seven days a week and when we go to work we enter a place in a capitalist society that is the absolute opposite of democracy. a tiny group of people, major shareholders and boards of directors make all the decisions thousands of employees not to speak of the communities where they work have to live with them their participation in those decisions is completely excluded in principle, law, and fact. so we spent most of our adult lives in an institution that is fundamentally undemocratic and pretend we live in a society

where the fundamental commitment is to democracy. this is crazy. [laughter] but it is a craziness that has to be opened up by the genius kind of vision so that you kind of shock a population into recognizing that all along that is what has been bothering me. it is not just that i am poor, living in a polluted environment in an overcrowded city. i am not treated like a human being. this is revolutionary stuff. that moment of revolution, if you can help it along with the kind of writing that lights the fire, very, very powerful. i want to talk about the two weapons that were used most effectively. the first was vilification. and when you stand up and speak a truth as powerfully and eloquently the state @booktv

this was true in colonial america and the england of william pitt and even finally in the jacobin revolutionary france where they were terrified of his riding which is why he ends up on the luxembourg. he is slated for execution. and the only reason he is not executed is because there would mark the doors of the people to be guillotined, and the door to his cell was open. denmark to the inside of the door. and at night the guard closed it he sat in the room holding his breath, waiting as the guards past to pull those people out who would be guillotined. and they passed him by. that is the only reason he is alive. there is actually an amazing scene where danton had been an ally is brought to the luxembourg and they embrace before the anton is executed.

so vilification, he was followed the government, as they do here, funded all sorts of front organizations, letter-writing campaigns. and they destroyed him. the power of vilification should not be diminished. it works. and he was being burned in effigy by the very people that he was writing for. in france, of course, he almost dies because he opposes the reign of terror. he was a quaker. in that sense he was not a good quaker. but he opposed the death penalty. including the regicide of the king. he stood up in the national convention and gave quite an eloquent and moving speech as to why you must even protect your enemies because once you begin this kind of rain of terror against those who oppose it come back to haunt you, very

prescient as to the direction of the french revolution. that is the first thing. i know speaking the truth about the administration, suffered from this kind of vilification, but it is a perfect example of what a truth teller has to undergo. the second is historical amnesia. [applause] and let's think about it. thomas paine was one of the most important founders of our country. where are the monuments to thomas paine? he has been erased as a kind of visible figure. and this gets into the in frightening erasure of the entire radical tradition which has been extremely effective in the united states. in a sense it is a way of in a kind of the stalinist way of rewriting our own history.

the communist party in this country, and if you were a black person in the 1920's where were you -- it was integrated. all of the tactics that the king used came out of communist tactics that were being used in the 20's and 30's. you are aware of it. but thomas paine represents that radical tradition that the establishment has worked from the beginning to erase so that thomas paine even in his own lifetime as cornel west rightly pointed out becomes a pariah. he has pushed away. and maybe we can talk a little bit about the mechanism that the state uses, vilification and historical amnesia and ordered to blunt and destroyed their radical prophetic voice. >> and that is so very important

. the 100 year anniversary, they refuse to have a statute anywhere in the city in tribute to him. philadelphia, that is where he struggled. he walked on foot from trenton to philadelphia in support of the u.s. military working with the military under nathaniel greene and george washington. and that is the kind of gratitude. why? because he was so genuinely revolutionary that once the revolution and it was over in the united states we got to move toward the counter revolutionary status quo as the federalists set in, as the french revolution set in, john adams, but i do want to add, the greatest black revolutionary socialist and the early part of the 20th-century was a brother named herbert harrison, founder of local five socialist party. the most popular in this city of

new york. it was reading thomas paine that turned him into not simply a revolutionary but also an agnostic. thomas paine was not an agnostic, but when hubert harris said -- a genius -- came to vote, came to harlem. and when he died there was just seven folks there in an unmarked grave to this day. read the biography. that is just volume one, you see . hubert harrison, historical amnesia. everybody knows about booker t. washington. god bless the negro. founded the black institution. old white money, old white elite money against the unions, precious immigrants coming in, deeply proud catholic.

everyone knows pulchritude washington. what about cuba garrison in the legacy of thomas paine. we could go on. another powerful, magnificent voice. who knows about the great victoria garvin? we need to know more. historical amnesia again. we reached a point where the truth has to emerge. we're going to be so hungry for these voices because we will be need full of their insight and most importantly they're courageous example. they're courageous example. at that point you are either courageous or you go under. we are not at that point now. revolutionary times. i don't think we live in revolutionary times. i wish it were. thomas paine arrived at the moment with a revolution already in place. he just drop sen. i wish we could just drop in.

[laughter] help black folks and white and red and yellow already organized, already anti imperialists, anti homophobic, anti-catholic, anti against jewish hatred or hatred of muslims and so forth. we just drop in on that and then write a pamphlet. [applause] we are going to get together tonight and right that pamphlet. we work all night and write that pamphlet. these are counterrevolutionary* revolutionary awareness escalating given the defeat, the relative defeat of the left in the last 35 or 40 years. triumphing in the name of capital and white supremacist. even when you get black figures who are the public faces of the. that is our moment, it seems to me. one of the reason folks are leery a little bit. we want to be honest about what we're up against.

none of us are going to live through the revolution we are talking about at all. some of us will get crushed like cockroaches because the powers that be are powerful. if i believed that the people organize are always mightier than the gangsters who run things. but the gangsters are powerful. very powerful. no doubt about that. >> and vilification. >> well, i would not confirm my case. i mean, i just think that it is impossible to tell the truth, especially about the vicious legacy of white supremacy and the connection to capitalist exploitation without knowing you are a candidate for character and literary assassination. that is just a fact.

over 400 years there has never been a person from john brown on the vanilla side to nat turner. told the truth about white supremacy and its connection to capitalism who was not targeted chronically, systematically across the board. that is why you have to have your spirit intact. you can keep it intact in a secular way. i get it intact loving jesus. i have my mother for king live to lift. i have my integrity to preserve. how do you bear witness in the face of those kinds of lines and crimes? that is what they are, crimes against humanity. jim crow is a crime against humanity. the educational systems in our cities, crimes against humanity the way those precious children are treated. a working class abuse. that is a crime against humanity

the drones dropping bombs on innocent children. crimes against humanity in the name of the u.s. people. call it for what it is. using that kind of language will just get you in trouble. it can get you killed. one last thought of this. maybe there is product of tension. we don't know where we are in the revolutionary process. >> you only know that afterwards was it the right time? was it possible? where the conditions in place? you never know. part of what it means to be a critic in the spirit of thomas paine is that you have always cut to push. you have got to push to see where and how far it could go. we are here.

[applause] and you are here. [applause] and this is probably the biggest attendance that -- that is the whole three days here -- that the left forearm has ever enjoyed. very interesting bits of an affirmation. i think we have to always be willing both to be cautious and honest about what we are up against. absolutely right. but always with a little space left for that unknowable reality when the things begin to happen really quickly. a author i referred to earlier from another place and time made famous that question of what is to be done. famous for another remark made about this question. he said, sometimes for decades nothing happens.

and then in a few weeks decades happen. you have to be open. thomas paine was open. if you are not open you cannot write that way. it is not just the effect that his writing has on the revolutionary situation. it is also the fact that a revolutionary situation, even when not grasped consciously, plays its role in shaping what it -- when it was possible to write. we have to be in sync with that unknowable extra house that is their party to live in a time like this and partly to be able to be progressive and a time like this. >> alexander bergman in an essay rights about precisely that point where he talks about a life in a revolutionary society being like a cattle that is

boiling. you don't actually see anything. all of the traditional edifices of power and structures not only remain in place but appear monolithic and that when they collapse, when they go down it appears to be absolutely sudden and unpredictable. as a foreign correspondent that was something i experienced covering the revolution in eastern europe. including the east german stasi state. where intel our security and surveillance state was the most pervasive security apparatus in human history. we have, of course, done things that stasi did not even dream of. and what happened was you had in leipzig mostly lutherans holding candle lit vigils, and they were not even very clear. the first demand was that they

be legally recognized as a group. they hardly appeared revolutionary. yet they captured as kind of zeitgeist which i think is there within the american society the king for a language to express itself. and thomas paine gave revolutionary american that language. but i think in that sense we are rapidly losing faith in the institutions, the formal structures of power which have been -- become a wholly owned subsidiary at the corporate state. but language is key. he makes that point. as long as you continue to speak in the false language of american democracy, liberty, how can you use the word liberty. every single one of us in this room has all of our electronic communications down loaded and is stored in perpetuity. you cannot use the word liberty

for a population that has wholesale surveillance. you have to use the word slavery and any government that has the capacity to use that mechanism will use it. the purpose of wholesale surveillance in a totalitarian state is not defined crimes but to gather evidence so at the moment that you seek to criminalize an entire group of people you have the trivia. it is not evidence because at that point crimes and truth and all of this is a fiction. but you have the material. that is precisely what is happening to us. so when that stasi state fell, it fell in a week and it fell when suddenly this handful of protesters in leipzig were joined by 70,000 people. and eric sent out an elite

paratroop division to fire on the crowd. they would not do it. just in this same way the cossacks would not fire during the bread riots which forced those are to get into a railway carriage and abdicate before he got back. and so the same thing happened in east germany. gone within a week because the paratroopers would not shoot on the crowd. >> it complex to that question completely unrelated to what you just said. the anatomy of revolution and the counterrevolution and how if we are talking about a man who was an abolitionist and a great irritation of the revolution we end up with a republic. how it was that the u.s. -- not colonial, but u.s. forces did fire on rebels in shays' rebellion and the uprisings. in that time between the

declaration of independence and the writing of the constitution. thomas paine supported the banks being paid. he was against the mob. he said you get changed by the rule of law or the military or the mob. he was on the side of the law. our laws come out of that time. i would love you to address the anatomy of the counterrevolution >> the thing to remember was that in pennsylvania there was notified between way and tory. the pennsylvania elite were wholly on the side of the british monarchy. the pennsylvania assembly back to the property class. and so on like in the other colonies, the opposition to the king in the independence movement was expressed. radical constitutional us who had no connection with pre revolutionary power.

and so in pennsylvania after the revolution those who take power, and like every other colony, had not been in power before. now, this alliance was extremely uneasy because as you correctly point out with the slave holding class -- and let's not forget that we had at the beginning of the revolution african-american soldiers and tell george washington, a slaveholder, banned the conscription of blacks into the continental army the only reason that the southern slave holding class supported the republic and had a rebellion of land liz weiss in the 17th century. the only reason they supported it was the labeling class who were black and enslaved were pushed out of the political system. so you have this kind of false narrative or false language that is used by figures like jefferson while ignoring huge

percentages. so once the revolution is over -- and they knew this before the revolution -- they have to push thomas paine out as fast as they could. that egalitarian movement was even at the time of the revolution an alliance of convenience that made them uncomfortable. on the issue of the bank's -- and i will let rick deal with this more. i would just say that the conception of thomas paine of laissez-faire capitalism came out of adam smith. and adam smith had a very benign view -- i am about to embarrass myself. miami your understanding. there was a kind of naive few that capitalism was creating a kind of equality. i think thomas paine was wrong on this, just as i think thomas paine was now used about human

imperfection. an inability to understand san and human corruption. so when thomas paine is in support of the banks and against the paper currency which did cause hyperinflation it comes out of this minute believe that that was a democratizing force. >> well, i mean, a developing view about the economy. very different. common sense. what he says in "the rights of man." and the second volume which is basically a social democratic. the first person to call for a guaranteed minimum income. guaranteed minimum income. and the very front page, every citizen ought to receive a lump of money when they are 15 and another major love when they are 45. no matter what. he breakdown the inheritance

transmittance of wealth at the top then people get a chance to start their teenage years in new police and then right before the warrants give you x45 start and again with another injection . it is not systematic. go to the banks. thomas paine did not receive 1 penny from the money he got from "common sense" or from "the rights of man". the two best selling texts in the history and he did not receive a penny. every penny went to the movement the cause. when he called early on that was away of supporting and providing financial support for the war. we had to have a national entity that would provide some resources to keep the war going in and an anti imperial way.

>> he did have a suspicion. the mob can be run by gangsters. you have to be very critical. when you talk about the people you had a critical view. whether there was democratic sensibility and vision. now, i would argue he was still wrong. i am not defending him. but is larger vision and sensibility. >> i raise the question because of its relevance today as we try to decide where our allies are and define the basic composition of the community of the population we are in. my other question to you has to do with this question of the intellectual revolutionary today i think i disagree with you, cornel west. attkisson and. [laughter]

>> tv every week we are interviewing grass-roots intellectual revolutionaries. i am thinking of people. for i am thinking of the dreamers with no access to power, no access to the system changing our entire comfort in the congress. even occupy. they got a lot of help and heard from the media. but they raised the question of capitalism in no way that we can talk about it in no way we have not been able to for yea i guess my suspicions of the mob makes me uncomfortable because some of my favorite people are in the mob. sometimes it's hard to develop who's the mob and who's the mob

capital him? the mob capital importing government. >> brother rick? >> you go right ahead. >> let's be generous to thomas paine. he thought that many of the problems he saw accumulating in this society at the time of our colonial link with britain could be overcome by a cataclysmic act, a revolution, cutting us off from this society of which we have been a colony, rejecting the monarchy, rejecting -- unbelievable. he then had to face as many revolutionaries had that what it was he thought was the problem, turned out to be only part of the problem here it was a necessary but not a sufficient step to take to achieve the

goals he so brilliantly put forward for us, that he so brilliantly expressed. so we learned in the aftermath of thomas paine, either within or after he dies, after him that there's more to be done, that been an independent country cut off from your colonial master is necessary, but it's not sufficient. how many nations have been discovering that in the last 200 years? particularly in the so-called third world. it's necessary but it's not sufficient. what else has to be done? we have to understand that if we actually want to realize the goals of a thomas paine, whether they are ticketed in the american media or the liberty quality of the french revolution, more has to be done. that's what inspired, if i may

be so bold, karl marx. that's who he is. eastbourne in the euphoria of the american and french revolution. he's caught up in all of that. he believed in it. he loved it. it's just when he looked around, germany in his time, it wasn't happening the way it was supposed to. ..lity and fraternity. it had brought capitalism which they only thought might be the road to liberty, equality, and fraternity. and then made this crucial discovery that capitalism is not the bearer of liberty, equality, and fraternity. it is the biggest obstacle imaginable. and then begins the learning that we are part of. the next revolution inspired and even made possible by the likes of tom paine now have to be

informed by what is our problem. that is in the king. that is a piece of theatrics. we feel empathy for the money they pass away on that. our problem is an economic system. it's not that he was wrong. he needed to open the space so we could get to what is on the agenda for the human race now. that is an enormous debt that we have. >> right. other questions coming from the audience. the center of anti capitalist revolutionary has switched to the third world. to you agree? >> i don't think we can talk about the third world as monolithic. it depends on which corner of the world we are talking about.

and not sure it can be broadly characterized in that way. an example you gave, folks who are telling the truth, exposing lice, bearing witness in the name of the struggles of poor and working people are not a mob it only becomes a mob when the gangsters takeover, just like the reign of terror, the french revolution. that is when the mob spilled over in the name of the people. just like they were gangsters in the name of the kingdom of the church, synagogue, and judaism, christianity, buddhism or whatever. for thomas paine, for him this was what he called a religious duty. he thought he had found the will of god by doing justly, loving mercy -- loving mercy and endeavoring to make his fellow creatures happy. that is the language from "the rights of man." >> but it has the center of

revolution sent -- shifted away. >> the center of revolution, 1776 in 1960. america has been the best in of white supremacy and the role of capital. >> a man. >> we have had resistance and protest but we have not had as south africa, venezuela, china, india 1948. america has been the bastion of capital. >> of vigilante violence. eighty out of every 100 americans owns a weapon. the government has nothing to fear. and this is the problem. the one sort of figure in our

revolutionary intellectual tradition, thomas paine who has been marginalized in silence, has not had any errors. and so hofstadter writes about this in that book on violence. you know, you go back and look at american history whether it is the slave patrol where the pinkertons or baldwin or the coal mining gun thugs or the vigilantes' who shot down the miners at blair mountain, right up to the tea party, the militias. violence in american society does not revolve around in a way that it did in europe around the transformer and theology. but around these kind of pro fascists. and that is something that as we move forward as a nation and we in toward the effects of climate change and economic disintegration we're going to

have to confront. you know, look at nevada. suppose those people have been black. what do you think would have happened? and in a way those vigilantes' become important to the system cannot tolerate it, occasionally reprimanded, but tolerated because in a moment of crisis the become used by the capitalist state. the you have the complex clan in the 1920's. three to 5 million members, reign of terror in this house, taking over states including indiana him. that is something we're going to have to confront. he know, these armed militias figures , these which have terrorized african-americans throughout their history and then killed radicals. that, i think, is an example of

how the legitimate rage and anchor has been skillfully manipulated to turn on the vulnerable. in terms of revolutionary tradition we should not -- we are the british monarchy. we are the empire. and we have the disease of empire. i don't talk to very many people in princeton, except for cornel west. even at princeton university you will get these absurd discussions about sending the 101st airborne to afghanistan to liberate women, as if you can talk about -- and i have been to war and they haven't. as if you can talk about human rights once you start using hellfire missiles. >> the answer to the question was don't worry about the center of revolution shifting someplace else because it was never here. another question. this has come up a lot.

can you connect the radicalism to the immediate crises associated with climate change? a couple of questions related to climate change. this climate change give us an opportunity, galvanize a revolutionary segment of society, or will business continue as usual until it is too late? we had a source of abundant energy, what we have a revolution. >> here live with break with thomas paine. thomas paine not only believed in human perfectibility, but he also believed in material advancement and progress. he broke with jefferson on this. jefferson was terrified of the revolution had wanted to throw with a fact. thomas paine saw it as a benefit and often talked about giving up

political activity. he designed an iron bridge and had many of the artisan class of the day at a deep interest in science. i think if we talk about blind spots that would probably be one. >> the way i would connect thomas paine to the climate thing, we are now forced to see yet another consequence of capitalism and the way it's intrinsic logic endangers us. that is, it is not just that it produces a absurd social inequalities that are self-destructive, but it also distorts our relationship to the ecotourism's fear. it is another argument, but it just takes us back to having to confront. we have an economic system that is fundamentally dysfunctional for the vast majority of us.

what are we going to do about this situation? and no matter how alarmist your reaction to the environmental, it really is another kind of alarmist and that you can generate for social inequality and many of the other consequences of capitalism that always bring you back to, are we able now to think through our relationship to capitalism that is parallel or comparable to what thomas paine took us through in thinking our relationship to a colonial master. >> and the oligarchs, wall street, big banks, big corporations are the equivalent of the monarchs. >> that's right. poverty is a new slavery. the new jim-crow is an intense form of slavery. means that working people lack -- walk into a declining economy in which wages stagnate, prices

escalate, and profits are at the top is a form of slavery metaphorically and physically speaking. we need language like that to somehow feed the imagination of people to begin to see, lo and behold there is another way out or not. climate change for me is a serious issue. i don't think it will be a catalytic issue. if there will either be revolutionary transformation that allows us to get some control over banks and corporations so we can treat nature as of now rather than in it. when i hear a lot of discourse about climate change, oh my god, my life will be like a wasteland. for poor people it is a wasteland every day, every day, every year. year after year. year after year. how do we make the connection between the climate change agents on the one hand but also those who are wrestling with these new forms of slavery and then the a liberal capitalist regimes.

>> and to recoup one little bit of credit to my thomas paine teaches us to think about revolution as a matter of changing a system. that is a very powerful contribution. it made him stand out from others of his time and it is urgently necessary. >> as long as we don't confront it as a system. and we need the help of thomas paine. >> the system plan. [applause] >> it is worth remembering that the people are not against the kings a much as the company, the east india company and the relationship, the role of the royal power and the corporation.

looking at all of this, a couple of people wanted to ask you one. we have your suggestion for how to keep hope, your suggestion for how to start an organized movement, and your suggestion for things people can mobilize around today. condensing a few different questions. as far as thomas paine, concrete suggestions whether it was the content of congress or the inheritance tax and the guaranteed minimum income. what would your speech today? are there things like that that one could organize around? we have about four minutes. i will give you five. [laughter] >> let me start. my colleagues can figure out what they're going to say. i have one thing that i get. i think it begins to confront a

systemic issue. we depend, as human beings, on the enterprises in our society that produce the goods and services without which life cannot continue. food, clothing, shelter, transportation and everything else. we permit the institutions that we defend -- depend on, the productive institutions to be organized in a fundamentally undemocratic way that leaves all of the decisions, those that affect the environment, the distribution of wealth, everyday life in the hands of a tiny number of people that sit atop the pyramid of these institutions, what we call corporations. if we don't want this set of outcomes we call the consequences of capitalism than we have to fundamentally alter the organization of production. if we want the production of goods and services, the core economic base of our lives to serve all of us that we have to be in charge of them, and it

cannot be a subset that allocates that position to itself. a radical transformation, which was beginning to be done and talk about in jackson mississippi, part of a broadening her recognition that that fundamental revolution that reorganizes production is where we have to go to achieve where the work putsches to cut pushes us. >> anyone else? >> i am thoroughly convinced that if 40 percent of america's children lived in poverty and one out of three young people were on parole, in prison, or probation that would be a different historical moment. a 40 percent of white children lived in poverty and one out of three white young brothers were on parole, on probation, or in prison we would have a different moment which means that we are going to have to do something

about the relation to the kneele liberal capitalist regime that is so tied to lies and crime. the issue how of black and brown is not just an issue of being morally sensitive. it is an anti systemic issue that goes right back to what is being talked about which is precisely the reason why young people are disproportionately targeted because the only time we have had the possibility was in the 1960's. it came at it so viciously. that is why we still have a political prisoner. they came at us viciously and are ready to come back again. the difference will be this time it will be black faces that will help lead the vicious attack. they were not in positions of power. now you have black elites at the top of the empire who can facilitate the vicious attacks.

on the top-10 list and being a terrorist with a black president in the white house. a black freedom fighter. we don't want to say a word about it. shame on us and terms of the legacy just 30 or 40 years ago. these kind of settings where they told the truth. look what they had to go through a. we so easily turn our backs and say low and behold, their service and sacrifice can be marginalized in the same way as thomas paine. appeal to colored citizens of the world. he did what? wrote his text and died in that hotel room and 11 months after. he went with a smile. he told the truth and expose to lines and bore witness. >> one minute. >> i would say that the reason

we are in such an incendiary moment has the political and economic and cultural oppression of poor people of color is now being visited on the sons and daughters of the white middle class. that is basically the engine of the occupy movement. these are intellectuals. always cited these intellectuals as vital for revolution arguing. so suddenly you have the sons and daughters who indoor police oppression, who can't keep a job or at least a job where they can sustain themselves, who are enduring marginalized people of color have endured for decades. at that moment the state is in serious, serious trouble because an alliance between and alienated white essentially middle-class or formerly middle-class, those people of

color, especially low wage working poor, one that i think once galvanized can begin to create. that is why the fight for the minimum wage is absolutely crucial. a form of political control, put there on purpose. ask any african american. sharecroppers were kept in slavery long after slavery was officially abolished. what we have done to college students in this country is absolutely criminal. my son is in france. if he told french college students there would have to pay $50,000 a year to go to college that would shut that damn country down which is precisely what he should be doing here. all right. >> everybody -- [applause] >> i will close by saying something is coming. it is always the ruling elite that determine the configurations of rebellion. unable to respond rationally to the mortgage foreclosure crisis,

joy of crisis, climate change. they have no internal limits. there will exploit until exhaustion or collapse and there will be blow back. [applause] >> i wanted just think our participants. make revolution. thank you. i just want to thank our friends . book tv, television for serious readers. >> and now ono >> we want to hear from you. tweet us your feedback ati

twitter.com/booktv. and now on booktv, senator jim demint spoke about his book, "falling in love with america again," in washington d.c. this is about half an hour. >> all right. our next speaker is senator jimh demint, and i've seen that some other people are filing in for it, but i think he'll allow me for us to take the seventh inning stretch by standing upt and saying the pledge of allegiance. i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands. one nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> [inaudible] >> thank you. so now, senator jim demint who has written a book called fr "falling in love with america

again." senatorhe demint served in the house, the u.s. house from '99 to 2000 and then was the senatod from south carolina until hetin joined the heritage foundation as president in 2013.o demint has a long record ofert lick service, of tighting forse freedom and conservative principles. he continuese to advocate for limited government, individual liberty, a strong national defense and traditional american values. senate he was a leader n the fight against obamacare, the misguided 2007 amnesty bill and against any interested united nations treaty. zero. well, i should have made the pledge of allegiance cut twice as long. have you as a captive audience. we have other people that have

filed in to hear some of our next speakers. after senator jim demint we have senator santorum. then we have after senator demint, we have senator rick santorum, and then we have a program on guns and gun rights given by emily miller, and the three speakers this the afternoon, i think, will be tremendously exciting. andrew mccarthy talking about a book that he's written about building the case for obama's impeachment, ann coulter, who i assume needs no introduction, and then what i'm most excited about, a little story about calvin coolidge, one of my most favorite presidents who, if you don't know anything about him, he took a red line to the entire budget and truly cut spending just in a tremendous way. if you don't know your history, it's worth brushing up on that. so that's what's coming up today on this fabulous program.

now, senator jim demint. come on up. [applause] i've already introduced you. you missed it. >> well, i'm glad i showed up. >> yeah, i am too. [laughter] >> how are you? well, great. got everybody spread out. thanks for coming. i guess i need to use the microphones here? >> please. because you're being taped. >> oh, okay. well, great. thanks for being here. this is an opportunity for us every year at heritage to hear from you but also to kind of share a little news of the things that we're doing. and i think it's important, first of all, i appreciate the group, particularly phyllis, for her longevity in the movement. so many of folks who claim to be on our side come and go or tend to be tempted away to the wrong ideas, but i sure appreciate phyllis' strong stand over so many, so many years. so thanks, all of you, for being here. i just want to take a few moments to just talk about this

whole concept of being conservative. what does it mean? sometimes political labels get confusing. probably all of you here consider yourself conservative in some way, but sometimes we don't talk about what it is that we're trying to conserve. and if you take the political labels off and think about what it is that we're talking about, what is the other side talking about, it really comes down to two basic ideas. when you confront a problem or a situation. there tends to be a gut instinct of some folks if there's a problem that we want to tell people what to do. you've probably run into them as hall monitors in school or whatever. they want to have the rules, they want everybody to do the same thing, they want -- they're not comfortable unless everyone is being told what to do. i see that a lot in washington.

you see a problem out somewhere across the country. they want to make a law that forces everyone to do something. i mean, there's another gut instinct that comes from, you know, me and a lot of people who share my same beliefs is that whenever you can when there's a problem, let people work that out for themselves. let them come up with their own solution. let people maybe in different parts of the country come up with different solutions so that we can compare what works and what doesn't and what works best. and i guess the misconception today is that if you standardize everything and make everybody do the same thing, that somehow that's doing to make everything better, that that's going to improve life for everyone when, in fact, it's very often the opposite. when you standardize everything across 50 states, you lose the opportunity to have 50 states competing to do things the best way. and 50 states learning from the states next to 'em of how to do

something better. you know, in the business world we call it continuous quality improvement and comparing ourselves with best practices and other companies, always looking at the competitors and other people and what they're doing. and what happens is one person will do it better, another person will do it percent, and you keep -- better, and you keep getting better and better. what we've seen happening in america when we began as a country that was very decentralized, that so much of what is good about america was built from the ground up. it didn't come from the government down, it came from the people and the little platoons, as edmund burke talked about, of families, of church groups, of small businesses, of little shops, volunteer organizations helping each other, building their communities. that's not only what works in america, that's what made us the best and greatest and most compassionate be nation in history. it's also what creates our love for each other. we're not patriots and lovers of

america because of a big federal government, we love our country because of the people that are closest to us. our families, our communities, the people that we know, the opportunities that we have to do things for ourselves. it's not what other people do for us. it's a very different philosophy than central planning and central management which goes back to where i started. the people sitting over here in the capitol, so many of them, it's not about making you free, it's about controlling your life. believing they know better than you do how to make decisions. and when you start looking at the different issues, you can really see how this breaks out. because for several decades in washington, the people who wanted to control things have been succeeded in so many areas. the federal government now has so much control over areas of our lives such as education,

certainly health care, managing our energy resources, our transportation system, our banking and mortgage system which means they control housing, a lot of the finance in our country which drives a lot of our total economy. and through regulations of almost every area of our lives, the control is coming out of washington. under this idea that they're helping us. there are a lot of good intentions here, but there is an old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. and i can promise you the roads all around washington, d.c. are paved with that same material. people here claiming that they're going to help you by controlling your life. the difference in philosophy between conservatives and progressives is our ideas are based on those principles that we can see made this country strong and great, created the

best life that has ever been created for humankind. it never was perfect, you can always find problems with it. but there's never been a nation like the united states of america. and we have done more not only to improve our own lives, but people's lives all over the country, all over the world. our ideas of free markets and free enterprise are doing more to lift people out of poverty than any government program in the world. you can look at the statistics around the world, and our own index of economic freedom is keeping track of which countries are doing the right things to lift themselves up. and you can see what that does to improve the lives of people. and ironically and unfortunately, so many countries around the world are copying those principles that made us prosperous while we're doing -- going the other way. but the key here is that we're not talking about two theories,

and is we're not arguing about things that we're not sure about what works and what doesn't. as a conservative, you can go boldly out into the country and talk about this idea of limited government in a vibrant civil society, of how less taxes and less regulations actually improves lives for everyone, and you don't have to argue theory. because now, particularly now, as you look at the policies of the left which have really prevailed in washington for several decades because despite some republicans being in charge, basically, they've all been spend more, borrow more, grow the government, give government more control of education, health care, everywhere. it's been the problem of both parties. and we're not only seeing debt and dysfunction in washington where these ideas have prevailed in cities and states around the country, you see massive failures.

you see cities like detroit that have been controlled by liberal progressive ideas for over six decades. they can't blame that on a republican, there hasn't been a republican in detroit in a long, long time. but this was america's premier city long before your time. you probably don't even know it, but this was the pride of america where our auto companies were the best in the world. and people actually went to detroit to vacation, just to see the place. and some of the wealthiest people in our country, wealth jesper capita of any place -- wealthiest per capita of any place in our cup. now it's completely the opposite, devastated, run by gangs. there's not even a major supermarket in detroit. it's bankrupt. and so are the ideas of the left. and if you look at other states, for instance, controlled by those same ideas like illinois, hopelessly headed towards bankruptcy with all of their

union pensions and everything that they've been doing for years. california running businesses out with their high taxes and regulation. the policies of the left of progressives have failed. they are progressing away from the principles that create prosperity and freedom. we're building the future based on those principles, and by applying those principles that work. steve moore, who works with us now, has worked with art laffer in putting together a book about the comparison of the states. and it just shows time after time how the ideas that we believe in are making life better and people more prosperous in the states where these principles are applied. where there's less taxes or in some cases no state taxes, businesses flock there. when you have tort reform, legal reform, eliminating frivolous lawsuits, you see doctors moving to practice be in places like texas where they don't have to

worry about trial lawyers as much as they do disease. they can practice their craft. you see states that are going around the federal be regulations on -- federal regulations on private land to develop energy like north dakota where only a decade ago of basically a wasteland, no one would consider going to north dakota for anything. now people are driving from all over the country, in fact, all over the world to find a better way of life. you see it in northern pennsylvania and other places where energy's being developed. but for years the left has kept us from developing the energy that would make america prosperous, help to solve our debt problem, our trade deficit, a lot of the issues that they complain about they make worse. but despite that, the innovative spirit of americans, the independent spirit of a lot of states, america has become -- despite this president -- the largest producer of energy in the world. that creates so much opportunity

for us when you push things down to the state level. states that are expanding school choice are doing so much better than states that are following the federal regulations such as the new common core. our ideas work. and it doesn't just work for rich people. if you look at school choice, it's closing the income gap of the most at risk kids in our nation today. so you can be proud of what you believe, because it's what works. the left is moving ahead away from the principles all under theories that this central planning and central management can actually work. but those policies have been on full display during the obama administration, and our economy -- despite spending more, trillions more than we ever have on economic stimulus -- we are still in a stag in a minute economy -- stagnant economy which puts people like you in a terrible situation going through college, developing student loans and not

even sure that there'll be opportunities on the other side. but this is not something you have to stand for. it's not a permanent situation. these are things that can turn around relatively quickly. because all of the things that made this cup work are still at work. they're just not working as well. because of very oppressive federal government, oppressive taxes, oppressive regulations and those people up here who think they can control your life when they can't even run their own lives, and they certainly can't run congress. so, folks, i appreciate you. it's very unusual for folks at a young age to begin to understand that actually freedom is your best path to process porety -- prosperity and also your best path to secure. the idea that government dependency will make you secure is a fool's errand. it's not true. you're most secure when you're most free. and we prove it every day here

at heritage, so thanks. i'll take questions. >> how about questions? >> yes. >> please, let's have some questions. >> thank you. [laughter] >> well, come on. >> answered 'em all. >> there we go, down in front here. start us off. >> my name is carrie, and i'm from texas. i have a question ability common core. as a future be teacher, what are some ways as a grassroots activist you can push to get against common core and how you can enlighten let's say other parents or other people's eyes about the dangers of what it actually is? >> yeah. this is one of those programs that on the cover sheet just sounded wonderful in the beginning. it was voluntary by states or whatever. but after you saw all the regs and how they basically tied up all the money that states need unless they adopt this, it's another example of good intentions gone awry.

jer bush, who -- jeb bush, who did a great job in florida as governor, very successful. the problem is once you see that happen, you forget the reason it happened is that he went outside of the federal regiment and did something different in florida. but now if you want to take what happened in florida and start creating national standards under that, basically what you do is conform every state to something instead of create an environment where states are trying to improve on what florida did and keep growing and keep making things better. so what we need to convince people of is this idea of federal standards which sounds wonderful, it sounds benign, actually keep quality down over time and give the federal be bureaucrats control other what happens at the state level. the best way for schools to operate is for teachers to have more control of their classroom, principals to have more control of their schools, local school

boards along with parents to help to shape the curriculum there and to create a best practice situation that has worked in so many industries where you can compare where you're doing with others, adopt the things that others are doing better, share good information and keep building a better and better system rather than creating a static, one-size-fits-all federal system. it doesn't work. if it did, you know, we spend more per capita than any other country in the world on education. and every place around the country like washington, d.c. where we're spending over 20,000 per student per year, you get the lowest quality of all. because of the bureaucratic nightmare that's there. so i tell ya, if we could get more teachers to break away from teachers' unions, that really hurts because the information that comes through teachers' unions about political issues so skewed, and they're a detriment

to our whole education system. so, but i appreciate you being willing to be a teacher, and i hope you can get in a system where you can be as good as you can be and not be in some kind of seniority tenure system that's controlled by unions. >> okay. we have a question back there. >> thank you for being with us, senator demint. i was going to ask you about -- >> name, please? >> hillary from texas. i'm -- on greta the other night you were talking about immigration reform, and i was just wondering if you could expand a little bit about that. do you think the talks between president obama and governor perry will be successful, or do you think anything good will come out of those things? >> this is a human tragedy, and you have to recognize that first. i mean, a lot of these are teenagers, but you also have younger children. what we have to go back to, the president mentioned in his talk right before i was on greta the root causes. and he acted like it was

funding. like the root cause is funding. i mean, he's got half a rl dollars to deal with -- trillion dollars to deal with on domestic issues, and that includes border security. the root cause of this is all of this talk of amnesty. if you make your way to america illegally, if you get here, you're going to get amnesty, citizenship and a were better l. the human traffickers in central america for the last two years have been using obama's own words as their marketing campaign, and it's encouraged parents to do the unthinkable this-- in many cases, to pay money to put these kids in a death train as it's called in mexico to go from central america to our borders knowing that our laws and the president's executive orders if you can get there, they won't turn you away. so what we've done is created an invitation for people all over the world, particularly central

america, to headache their way to our -- to make their way to our borders. and now what the president wants to do is, first of all, he's asking for this irresponsible amount of money that is not going to change things so that he can make it a battle between him and congress. he's smart politically because the media always buys into this. and he said the solution is this giant amnesty that was proposed by some in the senate a while ago when what you see on the borders right now is just a small glimpse of what this massive amnesty would do to our country. think about it. he's saying he needs nearly $4 billion to deal with about 50 or 60,000 children. what's it going to cost to deal with 11 million once you grant amnesty and get into the processing of these people and bringing them into the american society? it won't work. and what we'll do is make the situation on the border much, hutch worse. back before your time and when

ronald reagan -- who made very few mistakes, but he said one of the mistakes was believing congress if they gave am he'sty to three million illegals that were here at the time that they would then fix the border and fix our immigration system. but all that did was end courage millions and millions more to come here illegally and create hardships not just for themselves and the families they left, but hardships for americans, those who immigrated here legally. we are a country of immigrants, we need to reform our immigration system to welcome those who want to come here and be a part of who we are. but to say that our immigration system is based on those who get here illegally is just wrong, it's unfair to those who follow be a legal process. and what we need to tell the president is to stop talking about amnesty, stop misleading people particularly in central america that if they send their

children with these human traffickers, that they're going to get a better way of life. they're abused in many horrible ways as part of this process, and we're encouraging it. and it has nothing to do with what congress did or didn't do. all of this is at the feet of president obama. >> next question? oh, good. >> i am j.t. from michigan. i was wondering what is your position on the global warming debate? >> uh-huh. well, you notice they've had to change the name of that. [laughter] they call it climate change. we used to call that the four seasons. [laughter] but, you know, they're running into problems with this warming phenomenon because the globe hasn't warmed in 15 years. and and so the massive panic is a problem, and i'm afraid a lot of this global warming talk goes

back to where i started. it's one way to to get more control at the federal level of a lot of aspects of our economy and of development across the country. we need to take care of our environment. we need to continue to improve everything we do to our air and our water and our environment. but what we're spending now, even the folks who believe it say that these hundreds of billions of dollars we're spending on global warming is not going to make a fraction of a difference within the next 50 or 100 years. there's no one's claiming that what we're doing is actually going to change anything in the near term or even the long term. so let's don't confuse be taking careful our environment -- or care of our environment and making sure that we continue to reduce pollution in every way that we can. and i think that we're making progress in that area. but to do what they're doing under this guise of weather change is completely ridiculous

right now. what they're doing to raise the cost of energy in america. instead of continuing to improve the clean energy resources that we have, for instance, they're so hypocritical, the left. natural gas is a third less polluting than oil or coal. and we have it in abundance in shale. but as we start to develop it, who is trying to stop the development of natural gas in our country today? it's the same people pushing global warming. when, in fact, we could have cars and trucks running on compressed natural gas. we could have more and more of our electricity produced by natural gas. but who has been stopping that for years and continues to? the same people who want to get more control of our lives with this climate change phenomenon.

so i think we need to be all as conservatives in agreement that our environment is precious, and we need to protect it and make it better. but, frankly, a lot of the moves of the left in this area have actually hurt the environment more than they've helped it. a lot of the additives in fuels that were supposed to make it less polluting have actually created more pollution. so i frankly think for most of it it's a big power grab, just about everything else they're doing. so let's agree to take care of the environment. but if the globe's not warming, let's don't panic and spend hundreds of billions of dollars that could be used in better ways right now. >> okay, another question. yes, on the end here. >> hi, my name is katie trudeau, and i'm from richmond, virginia. quick question, what would be the conservative argument for encouraging the keystone pipeline? what would you recommend that we talk to our peers about that?

>> okay. well, the country is using energying, and we're using oil, and a lot of it still comes from the middle east, okay? so getting more oil refined into gasoline from canada is not hurting the environment. in fact, moving it by pipeline is much safer for our environment than moving it in ships that can run aground, that can leak, and the whole transfer process where you get them loaded on ships, loaded in a harbor, they're loaded many times on tankers or put in another pipeline in another part of the country. so the idea that somehow this pipeline is harmful to the environment is absurd in the first place. canada's one of our biggest energy resources. they're an ally. they're next to us. and what's going to happen is if we don't accept this, they're going to end up having to sell it overseas which makes us more dependent on countries like

venezuela, wherever who don't like us. and that's a very vulnerable situation for us to be in. so it's better for the environment to move from pipeline rather than all the tankers and other transportation involved, and it's just good for it to have north american security here on energy. so each the president's own -- even the president's own people that he put in charge of studying this have come back and said it has no impact on the environment. it's all political. if you look back and follow the money, if some of his supporters who probably are promoting other forms of energy -- solar or whatever -- and just don't want the country to have, you know, more secure energy resources. >> well, any other question? >> folks, thanks. >> thank you, senator. [applause]

>> our special booktv in prime time continues tonight at eight eastern with jo becker on her book, "forcing the spring: inside the fight for marriage equality." at 9:15 you'll hear from edward klein talking about "blood feud: the clintons versus the obamas." after that, the former mayor of washington, d.c., marion barry jr., on his book, "mayor for life." here on c-span2. a couple of live events to tell you about on our companion network, c-span, beginning with a brookings institution conversation with the president of mall ya. that's at 10 a.m. eastern. at noon a discussion hosted by the congressional internet caucus on a ruling by the european court of justice that google and other search engines must consider requests by any citizen of the european union to delete information about them, a

policy known as the right to be forgotten. up next, a forum on the technology used for cutting carbon emissions hosted by the u.s. energy association. we'll take a short break from this event at 9:15 eastern for a pro forma session of the u.s. senate. >> my name is john hammonds, senior director of the u.s. energy association, and i'd like to welcome you all here for this presentation. i'll give a short introduction, then i'll turn it over. unfortunately, our center screen was not working, as you saw, but these two side screams actually have better -- screens actually have better clarity, so you'll get a better picture. klaus lakner is the professor of physics in the school of engineering and applied sciences and the director of the center for sustainable energy at the earth institute at columbia

university in new york city. his research interests include closing the carbon cycle by capturing carbon dioxide from the air, carbon sequestration, carbon footprinting, geoengineering, innovative energy systems and their scaling properties, the role of automation, robotics and mass manufacturing and down scaling infrastructure system ises and energy and environmental policy. klaus earned his ph.d. in theoretical particle physics in 1978 from hiding berg university. after a post dock at cal tech, he joined the theoretical division at los alamos in 1983. 1999 he became the national laboratory's acting director for strategic and supporting research, and then in 2001 he moved to columbia university. he is the co-founder of the zero emission coal alliance, an industry group formed around an advanced coal-fired power plant design that he co- invented. klaus was the lead author on the

ipcc special report on carbon dioxide capture and storage and a member of the national science academy's committee on the future of coal. he holds numerous patents on air capture and energy technology, and he will share that with us today. klaus? >> thank you very much for having me. it's a great honor to be here, and it's particularly nice to be able to speak a little longer than normally and actually i hope i can explain things in the time allotted. i'm sure we will have time for questions at the end. but i would very much enyounger you to -- encourage you to interrupt me. i don't mind, quite the contrary. i think discussions get more lively if you have an issue and we can settle it right here. and i do realize that the topic i'm talking about, air capture, is at some level controversial and, therefore, if you have issues, if you have questions, feel free to interrupt me and

ask it right here and then, and i will do my best to answer it and sort things out as best as we can. so to begin with, i would like to just introduce the basic concepts and put air capture into a larger context because i think just talking about air capture doesn't really explain why one would want to do it and how it fits into the bigger picture. and to begin with i think i'm talking here to the converted. i would like to point out that we really do need energy, and we cannot solve our climate issues and other pollution issues which come from having number by not having energy. we do need it for a variety of reasons. i would say we have food, we need fertilizer for that, we need energy. we couldn't sustain a population without nitrogen.

if you want water, there are nearly unlimited supplies in the ocean if you can figure out how to desal nate, and that takes numbering. if you extract minerals from the ground, you again need energy. you can again mine copper with a fraction of a percent of copper in it because you have the energy to do so. in 1900 couple ores were running out, but they had 10-12 percent copper in it. today we can do much better by throwing energy at the problem. and if you want to clean up after yourself in the environmental issues, you again need energy to do that because nearly every problem you have is you create end to by but you didn't want it. and that, again, will take energy. the challenges that in some ways the atmospheric lem of co2 has to be stabilized. and at the same time, fossil carbon is not running out. i don't want to get into a lengthy discussion about that

here, but i'd be happy to engage you if you have questions on that. but i'll simply start from the observation that we have been thinking of running out of petroleum and coal and gas since the 19, early 1900s, and we seem to find always more when things start to look a little short. and so i would argue we have, certainly, enough coal in the ground to wreak havoc on the planet, and so we are not limited by the availability of toes suggest carbon. fossil carbon. in my view, if you want ten billion people to get to a decent standard of living, we need very, very large sources of energy. the three which come immediately to mind is solar energy, and maybe its derivatives can be thought of as well like wind is derived from solar energy in some ways. there's nuclear energy, there's fossil carbon, and all three still have to get to the point where they really can support you. nuclear energy has its own robs which is not the top -- problems

which is not the topic of today. solar energy still is trying to get competitive, and it has a big intermittency issue which these to be resolved. and fossil carbon, while it's not immediately running out -- it probably could last a couple hundred years -- has a very severe problem with climate change, and that will need to be addressed. so you have to figure out how to make it carbon neutral. as i said, i think the fundamental limit is the environmental limit, not the resource in the ground, and you see in this chart what might happen if you follow various trajectories. if you follow the first one here which is labeled continued exponential growth like we have seen for the last hundred years or so, well, we would get off the chart, and we would exceed a thousand ppm of co2 in the atmosphere before the century is out. we started at 280 parts per million at the beginning of the industrial revolution and have

now reached 400 parts per million. i took 2010 here as sort of a starting date to change things, and hypothetically i hold emissions constant at 2010. and you notice we still run up not quite linearly, but we keep running up in co2 in the atmosphere. holding emissions constant doesn't solve the problem if 400 parts per million is your critical value. you just delayed a little bit, you didn't solve the problem. you just pushed it out a little. if you go down to zero, then, of course, the co2 very, very gradually goes away, but i would point out that even after 200 years you are still at about half of what you started with. and ultimately, if you were to go to 10% of current emissions, you would actually add about 2200 -- at about 2200 start going up again. co2 will never go below 360 parts per million in the context of this model and gradually work

it way up was the ocean -- because the ocean slow down in its uptake. i sort of marked the one-third of current emissions level as the one that doesn't solve the problem but kicks the problem down the road. all i would like to point out, though, is the per capita allowance in a world of ten billion people with that rate of emission is roughly 4% of the actual per capita emission in the u.s. today. so from a harmless engineer's perspective, that means we have to go to zero, right? sure, we will overlook a few things here and there, and there are some emissions we didn't count on, and reaching 4% of where we are today we may as well say on our lapper how to figure out -- banner how to figure out to be carbon neutral, how to figure out how to have no carbon emissions. i think this discussion has started at the ipcc lately. i think the concept of saying there's a lifetime for co2 and it gradually goes away is,

actually, highly misleading. there is not a single lifetime for co2. the longer you wait, the slower it is to get out of the system. so in the end, it takes hundreds of thousands of years for the last 20, 25% to actually go away. so in a way, there is no single lifetime. that co2 is extremely persistent. and a thermal effect of having had it linger even longer because there's a delay in warming up. so roughly speaking, the impact of a gig ton of carbon dioxide that made it to the air is with us for another thousand years. so from that perspective, you should think of the emissions of co2 to the atmosphere as permanent. not all of it stays in the atmosphere, but roughly half of it will be with us for hundreds and hundreds of years. so, therefore, it's not about stabilizing emissions, it's about eliminating emissions. and that is a rather different thing. and people have brought up this bathtub analogy which is somewhat sort of ironic because the original version of this

analogy was it's a bathtub. you keep filling it, and as long as you fill, the level will rise. but then people are so trained to think in flow-through models but they immediately say there's a drain in the bathtub, and you can match the drain. the message i want to put out here is, yes, there is such a drain, but the drain clogs up over time. the more you put in, the smaller the drain will get, and we will not, we will not drain out what we put in in a short time. eventually, even a small trickle will keep raising the co2 level, and we just have to come to grips with the fact that we should think of this as a stop versus a flow problem. but that, in a way, makes the calculus simple. you just need a conversion factor. and since roughly half of the co2 stays in for hundreds years, you have a simple formula. ..

roughly the content of this big fuel tanker at some airport, which has about 30 tons of fuel in the back. so next time you sit at an airport and see the plane you on being filled, you personally have consumed one of these tankers, you have done your share to get to 450 ppm, and from now on out you really shouldn't consume anymore see it

here, producing more co2. this is your lifetime, your for ever a lot been. for you and your children. and once it is spent we are at 450 ppm. i think you a question. [inaudible] >> this is 30 tons of carbon and, therefore, the diesel truck, the fuel truck which is roughly 30 tons has roughly 30 tons of carbon in it. that is literally the skill. and by the way, it will take the average person just about six years to go through that. so that sets the scale, the magnitude. in a way the urgency. so if you take what i just said as face value, the inescapable conclusion is that without carbon capture and storage, fossil fuel will have to be phased out. similarly you can argue that for any kind of fossil carbon, out of the ground another ton of garbage will have to go back in in some form or another. i'm not saying in geological,

but you will have to return it again. ultimately, the atmosphere does not relinquish the cq you put into. so if you put it in no matter where it came from, you have to get it back out. if you run on biofuels you did a automatic. it run on biofuels, it doesn't matter. if you put in the atmosphere you are responsible for taking it back out because otherwise it will i can relate or a least half of it will actually in the atmosphere. based on an emergency, if you want to -- that truck sort of made it clear. but let me do a simple cancellation. i'm assuming 3% growth plus 1% population growth. so we have roughly 4% rise in the energy world consumption or in the world gdp. and now we have to get better every year and not anything carbon.

if i get better by x. percent every year thing you congratulate that you will never spend more than a certain amount of carbon and so you can ask how much do i have to improved in a year to over 450. this was done a few years ago so 90 ppm as the starting point. if you want to start at 450 p. object reduced 20% in five years you're done. that is now history. but the point i want to raise come if you stop at 750 ppm used to reduce carbon intensity every year by 4.5%. that is a lot. so in a way its origin if want to stop at 450 ppm, by now we're talking 8% or so because we didn't to anything for five years and it didn't account for that in this graph, so we need about 8% annual reduction which is far, far from what we really do. but even if you start -- 4%

annual reduction is a big challenge. let's pull up our sleeves right now. the debate, business guided. we need to figure out how to stop. the faster we can stop the lower the level we will end up at. so this is where the discussion was fairly recently. now the ipcc has said in its latest report, no gush of wind but this way, any scenario that actually stays out of harm seems to involve large periods of time with negative emissions. times where we managed to pull more carbon dioxide back and we commit. and that is basically an admission that this is a permanent thing. and if you want to balance the budget you have and you cannot stop fast enough, which seems to be very challenging, you need to in the future have times where

you're at negative emissions, otherwise you will overshoot the 450. presumably we are likely to do that. negative emissions require first and foremost carbon storage, or to put it more bluntly covered carbon disposal. if you cannot figure how to do that we cannot solve this problem. the second part it will need is some way of getting the co2 back now that it has been in needed. we have to pull back. either we have biomass or chemical ways of pulling see it to get out of the atmosphere or maybe out of the ocean but we have to get that carbon back somehow or another. that technology needs to be solved. i will argue that you cannot quite do this with biomass because the scope to which you have to go to some to be too low. the storage capacity you need is potentially very large. i would argue that if you pulled

back seat to, the ocean will also to the back because the equilibrium will come back. it may be a little bit of an exaggeration but if you put four gigatons out of carbon and to get our rise by one ppm, then if you want to draw back a ppm, you'll have to roughly get four gigatons back. because the ocean is now backing equilibrium our out of equilibrium. the other way and the co2 will come back at you as you put it out. so roughly speaking if you want to go back 100 ppm you're talking about 1500 gigatons of co2. this is more than is admitted in the 20th century. for that reason alone i am convinced that in all likelihood we will implement carbon capture and storage because we have no choice. because we are solving problems we already traded, or about to create and cannot help ourselves creating because we have enough momentum that it will overshoot. i can give you several centers.

we go to 450 and we find it simply unbearable. jim hansen is saying we should go back to 350. that's 100 ppm draw. another option is we overshot to five and 50 which is not all that implausible and we decided to come back the 450. the possibility become from five and 50 back to 350 which case it's 250 ppm. why bother? if you are talking, if it gets serious we're talking about hundreds or so 100 ppm but if we do that we are having a carbon sequestration problem as big as we had all of last century, if not bigger. that's the challenge we have. and, therefore, i think it's very likely that we would end up with the technology whether we like it or not. but in my view it's not an if,

it's a win, about 60 years. but that would allow to to come back. so you could imagine a scenario like the red line i overlaid on the computer model i put in before. that, by the way, would be about 100 ppm. so in my view you end up needing technologies to solve the problem. you need to advance carbon management. you clearly need to close the carbon cycle. you may not close it by shrinking it. you may sit carbon comes out of the ground. carbon goes back or cycles very fast with fuel and co2, or you may decide that you abandon carbon and other forms of energy. that's sort an option but i think we are nevertheless committed to 59 gigatons of carbon storage because we delayed and we dawdled and we

waited too long and now it is hitting us. i think you need to go beyond conventional solutions. i think just doing retrofits will not solve the problem. you need more than one storage option. if we find a mistake in that one, we are really in trouble. we need more than energy alternatives. we need more energy alternatives and we need, we also need more than just energy efficiency. energy efficiency well but it will not get us to zito and it certainly will not get us negative. -- get us to zero. 100 ppm reduction is more than 20% commission as i pointed out and 1,500 gigatons is a mass of water in lake michigan. some sort of sets the scale of what we are talking about. you end up having to build an industry, a large industry in a 30 year time when the. that's the challenge ahead of us. as i started to think about this

over the years, some of you i'm sure it seen this before, you need the ability to store the carbon dioxide in someplace in some form somewhere. you will need to deal with big concentrated sources which are roughly half of the problem. and you will need particularly for the negative emissions the ability to pull co2 back out of the air by some means or another. and i will talk about one of those in a minute. powerplant capture i would stress is not enough. it produces roughly 30% of the emissions, and successful scrubbing will reduce the emissions by 70%, but we do think 30% by 70% does not give you 100% reduction. no matter how you do it. even if i take our point sources only cover half of all admissions. and negative emissions clearly require a new approach to all the co2 i can capture at a

powerplant is seo to which otherwise would've gone into there. i cannot reduce the co2 in the atmosphere by stopping the powerplant and lets it -- unless it's by a. i argue biomass capture is not enough. i give you a very simple argument which convinced me early on that that likely is right. agriculture fetus. we consume hundreds of metabolic energy which we get from food. so as an energy supplier the agriculture feeds us 100 watts. the energy systems we have could give us industrial energy, fetus 10,000 forms. so you're asking 1% to step in and pinch-hit for the 99% player. and i think in the end you have a horrible collision between food supply, energy demand, and environmental footprint. because let me tell you if you more than double the agricultural land, which this would imply, you end up really

having to do a heavy environmental footprint. and you are still competing with more meat for people in china, and that will be very, very difficult. and if you wanted to give the co2 back you could have to operate at the human energy scale because we're putting out 30 gigatons of co2 a year and you want 1,500 gigatons back in less than a century so you talking about very comparable numbers. so growing the bio fund that large i think is highly, highly unlikely. so we need more options. that brings me to the concept of air capture. and what intrigued me about it early on after i convinced myself that it seems good, it literally separates the sources from the fix. the air makes it so fast and so across the planet that you can collect anywhere. you could imagine having in

australia a collector take credit for co2 emissions right here in washington. just a matter of paying for it. the reason for that is within a latitude, it makes it around the globe in about a few weeks. in the hemisphere within six months, between hemispheres in about two years. that is pretty easily seen because out of the south pole the co2 concentration lags the northern hemisphere by about two years. most of the co2 which shows up came from the northern hemisphere. so the typical mixing time is that one. we are not worried about co2 in versions on a yearly basis to you can collect co2 anywhere and make things work out. in particular you don't even have to match all that accurate. so you could say we can go after the nations which happened 30 years ago. nothing prevents you from doing that, and that end is the

essence of negative emissions. it provides you options. one option, air capture provides and then therefore the environmentalists are unhappy with me isn't maintains access to fossil fuel. if you have the ability to pull co2 out of the atmosphere and find a place to store the co2 come you can keep using fossil fuels. so as an excuse, you should do that and that air capture is part of it. >> breaking away now from this discussion as the senate is coming in for a brief pro forma session. the presiding officer: the senate will come to order. the clerk will read a communication to the senate.

the clerk: washington, d.c., friday, august 8, 2014. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable christopher a. coons, a senator from the state of delaware, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: patrick j. leahy, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, and pursuant to the provisions and pursuant to the provisions >> so the senate is a journey for the remainder of their september recess. later that day at 5:30 p.m. senators will take up a series of confirmation votes including jill prior to serve as judge of the 11th u.s. circuit court of appeals. as well as three of the presidential nominees deserve on the social security a vice report. we will return now to the discussion on ways to reduce carbon emissions.

>> so air capture could become a storage option for intermission electricity by holding the energy in liquid fuel when you have too much. and ultimately you can draw down the co2 in the atmosphere. if you were big enough to do with the entire transportation sector, you now scale up by another order of magnitude, you draw the co2 down from the atmosphere and could get there but you can't really get there until you solve, until you stopped the meeting. otherwise you're not really negative. are just by bookkeeping you can say one particular player the meeting. but you really only negative after you stop everything else. i do want to stress because the other part where people are environmentalists said with a capture, this is not an excuse to procrastinate. it may be taken as such i would argue we are too late for that anything that's where the ipcc

says we have procrastinate did and we're now stuck with the consequences. part of a consequence is we will have to do it. for the end of talk but a technological fix. there's a paper about three rules for technological fixes apply to air capture. i thought that was a very nice paper in nature a few years back and makes my point more eloquently than i can make it. there are three rules. the first of many tech logical fix is that it actively must affect the relationship. you can visit their text but they say that's obvious. you emit co2, you take a back. only have the right relationship and you can cut to all the publications. you don't need to know what precisely happened and why it happened and what the co2 would do if you left it alone. all you need to do is you put out a ton, you bring back a ton. similarly you can assess what you did what you're supposed to do. you can measure how many times

have you collected and you can see the effect on the atmosphere. so if somebody is cheating and pretending in the co2 goes up. it shouldn't happen. if you pay attention how many tons of actually being collected, it's all very straightforward. and he says ultimately it has to be feasible. they say we don't understand why nobody spends even a little money it takes to demonstrate it. because it does look to them like it is feasible. but that, of course, isn't in the eye of the beholder. there have been plenty of critics who say it's utterly impossible and, therefore, i should spend some of the time i have a lot of here to argue what i think is possible, and why the critics have over stated their point. so the concern of the critics, this is all fine and good, but if you can't do it, it will cost $1000 a ton of co2, why bother? you can't make it work anyhow.

as i look at it, there are two fundamental problems with getting co2 from the air. the first one everybody gets me over the head with, which is its only 400 parts per million. so it's hard to get out. it's one part in 2500. the second problem in which we sort of struggled with far more than the first problem is the air is full of water. before you know what you're having a great water collector which collects water to the tune of $30 a ton, or $30 a cubic meter. that's not what you had in mind. that is a very expensive proposition. most things which binds co2 will also bind water. this is actually an important issue to address and come to grips with. the other point, and i probably started this when i got early on excited about it, it's a little bit like the flu gas project because with these analogies.

i'll be on the other side of the fence and say in some way it is very different from flue gas scrubbing. and it's not a good idea. so there was a study out a few years ago that said in essence if i summarize it in a nutshell, too difficult, to gaza, not practical a and the cost estimae is $600 per ton. i was asked about it, the picture, and whether i have a rebuttal to their too expensive argument. very hard to rebut because when i analyzed the same process i came to the conclusion it's $1000 a ton. so it's a little bit like some analysts getting together, concluding it cannot fly. what am i about to say about it? it can fly? know it cannot. but the logical jump is to go from having process which doesn't work all that well but was designed to do what we can

recover together with a simple explanation of current technology is did expensive. the answer is yes, it is. that doesn't rule out there are other processes which are not too expensive. you cannot conclude from the fact penguins cannot fly, the flying is impossible or the birds can fly. some birds cannot. separation technology cannot be extrapolated and they say by the way it is unavoidably deteriorated. this is due to a famous chemical engineer, sherwood, who argued that the cost -- come back to the point in a minute. my conclusion from this is just don't try to extrapolate. it doesn't work all that well. you have to really rethink the problem from scratch. and you need non-conventional solutions from the start.

sort of as a matter of analogy, airplanes were invented by people build bicycles. that's not accident. if you have less locomotive engineers on it, they would say we can never light weight enough and landing on track is incredibly difficult. so you need to start from first principle if you want to do things. and going from standard separation technologies to air capture does not work. you have to rethink it. the inspiration ultimately comes from nature. i can't resist this airplane analogy. back then people were very happy to tell you that heavier than air flight isn't feasible for all the need to do is look out the window and see a bird. now they tell me capturing co2 from the atmosphere is impossible, but i think that's what the triage is doing. so you have to do it differently. there's no question about it. there is an example in nature

which managed to solve the problem. so we need to figure out how because nature is not impervious to the laws of nature and it will abide by. so the argument that you can't make it within the laws of nature is probably wrong. let me summarize before i give you the solution. we have to move huge amounts of air because we need a lot of air before we have seen enough co2. making good contact at low pressure drops. we cannot pay for driving the air through a filter, a pact did as would we do in standard separation. it would ruin our economy. avoid water capture. if you capture water rather than co2 we are in trouble. we need to avoid all in missions of something, we can't lose to the air. we cannot mess up the airflow coming out. after all, we tried to clean it up, not make it dirty. we need to avoid expensive energy. you can easily spend too much money on energy if you're not

careful. ultimately, in the longer-term you need to bootstrap this from small applications to get to full scale and the need to take advantage of learning. so these are the challenges. what got me intrigued early on is these observations. there's an artist rendering of how a big air capture, as big as a big windmill might look. i was interested in whether passionate what he would do. it collects kinetic energy from air. every cubic meter delivers about 20 joules of energy. the co to combustion equivalent in air is 10,000 joules. what i mean by that is if you take all the co2 out of the cute meter of air and put it back because i burnt a thimbleful of gasoline, how much energy dedicate by doing that? its 10,000 joules. so in other words, the windmill of which 20 joules of co2 emissions because it gives you energy without making co2 and the air capture allows some

diesel engine to put out 10,000 joules of primary energy. so in a way the air capture device goes after something which, if 500 times as concentrate in the air as kinetic energy, yet we have no trouble building windmills. so the fact that it is doable came to me out of this observation, right? because the collector for co2 is equivalent to its carbon footprint or its negative carbon footprint to be carbon oh boyden's of the windmill is several hundred times. that was what got me started. the observation from this is the first step in the process just contacting the air, may not be easy but it's not so hard that we don't do it. we do it in a windmill. we do it with much less value coming out. by the way if they would cost the same per meter and they would be equally efficient and

the windmill cost 5 cents per kilowatt hour, my co2 would cost 50 cents per ton. so my conclusion from this was not that it will cost 50 cents per ton back then, my conclusion was his first up is not going to kill me. what's going to get me is the second step now that i absorbed the co2 on some material i have to get it back on. that will cost me money because i know that from a powerpoint -- powerplant scrubber. but the problem now is the thing, i have to remove the co2. i have to pay a little bit more energy because my absorbent had to be a little bit more stronger and it turns out that scales arithmetically. i need to pay an extra amount of energy but if you work it out, we pay about 1.550 times depends on how do the counting in energy, so bottom line is we

cost a little more but not 300 times as much more as the dilution ratio would suggest. we are a little more expensive. here you can see the energy. this is how much energy we need for every this is how much we need for co2 from the powerplant. what you see is, the engineers can see this, very similar. let me put this up for fun with a painted form so we know we do map on occasion. by now nobody disagrees with this. thermodynamics of capturing co2 is pretty benign. the criticism is that that's all good and theoretical but you can't get the. that's what the critics say. they say sure, we're set because of getting things linear in the dilution. here is the natural -- national research council in which he

said look, the cost of metal is proportional literally proportional. the factor is because you $10 per ton of ore. that's a sure way to rule. you apply this to our problem, we are dead, $25,000 a ton of co2. so we can do that. so here is our aspiration where we want to be, way below this curve. i put your $20 a ton because he's her 1985 numbers. so how come we could get -- my first observation is, it makes perfect sense because if you ask what can you do for $10 a ton, i can dig it up, crushed, private, run floatation and i can dispose of the tail end. i just spent $10 in $1985.

i'm done. basically what that says, the cost of extraction dominated by that first step. everything else is small potatoes. if that's the case obviously got to look at twice as much, you spend twice as much money. therefore, sherwood to rule nearly always applies. i would point out that the seawater is not an occur. the reason it's not come we are not crushing and grinding seawater. it follows its own curve. lastly the uranium from seawater, and that is even better than what we would ever need to get you in order to fix it. that's because uranium in seawater is three parts per billion. and according to mr. sherwood, this would cost you $3 million per kilogram. japan said between 200, 12 and