it, he replied. i suppose not, the lady, which in my stay at home? >> this weekend on monarch in history tv, on c-span three. no, environmentalist dennis hayes, who served as the first national coordinator of earth day in 1970, talks about next year's 50th anniversary, and his organization's policy and public awareness campaigns. this 40 minute conversation was hosted by the national press club. >> good morning, welcome to the national press club, my name is allison fitzgerald kojak, i am

a correspond with npr news, and i am the 112 resident of the national press club. i would like everyone to take a moment and check your cell phones, turn off, or turn the ringers off please we have several cameras in the room. >> the united states, will complete its withdrawal from the paris climate agreement, next year. there is a crisis of classic pollution in our oceans, and 100 year storms that seem to be happening with that news i would like to wish our guest today dennis is a happy 49th birthday. it was 49 years ago in 1970 that hayes helped launch the first day. it was a time of when america's national decision involved eagles was listed as an endangered species, as angeles and pittsburgh are routinely developed in thick smog, and the cuyahoga river in cleveland was so polluted, it caught

fire. and on the first earth day, it made it 20 million people participated in demonstration. the effort launched a sweeping series of policy changes in the united states. including the clean air act, the clean water act, and the establishment of the environment protection agency. today, hayes is chairman of the board of the earth day network which has become an international event that focuses attention on the state of the earth's health. so as he looks to be events golden anniversary next year, he is focused on where he says it is the biggest threat to our planet. today, climate change. as he told stanford magazine last year, he wants next year's 50th anniversary to quote quiet and unprecedented global outpouring of outrage over climate change and other global threats. we will hear more about those plans this morning. please join me, and welcoming dennis hayes to the national press club.

>> thank you for much allison. >> the 50th anniversary of earth day next year will be the largest and most diverse action i believe in human history. we plan to engage more than 3 billion people and 190 countries. we have made these kinds of claims before and often done so at some level of trepidation, and in every case, just proven to be more modest than what actually transpired. for the first earth day, we hope to have millions and at the end had 20 million. in earth day 1990, we aspired to 100 countries and 100 million people, at the end we had 200 million people at 140 countries. i am hoping once again in 2020, we are going to blow past our goals. more importantly, 2020 will mark the time when global

carbon emissions stop growing, and begin to decline. for more than two centuries, and will carbon emissions have been growing inexorably and hit their highest levels ever in 2018. carbon emissions actually accelerated after a scientific consensus had developed around climate change. mankind has pumped more carbon into the atmosphere in the 30 years since 1988, when james henson provided his famous testimony to congress, then in the entire previous 250 thousand years of humanoid history. although president donald trump has taken a wrecking ball to international climate trees, scott to pollute his peer review science, appointed the two worst epa administrators in history, and pledged to resuscitate a dead coal industry, i am confident that the end is in sight. when conditions are right, people are ready to demand change, and america can turn on a dime. it recently happened in the

united states on marriage. more recently it happened in new zealand on gun control. it happened globally on the ozone hole. the 20 million americans who turned out in 1970 catapulted the environment from a second- tier issue to a top-tier issue in politics. throughout the spring, events focused on air and water pollution, toxins, oil spills, pesticides, burning rivers, lead paint, dangerous species endangered species, and dying lakes. we saturated the public consciousness. that. seven of the dirtied of men, members of congress went down to defeat, and races for the environment clearly provided the margin of victory, these included the chair of the house public works committee. powerful laws that have been unthinkable in 1969 became unstoppable by the end of 1907 the, within just five years of that first drift day, america passed the clean air act, the clean water act, the endangered species act, the occupational health & safety act, the marine

mammal protection act, the safe drinking water act. we established the epa, we banned lead-based paint, we banned ddt, we banned lead in gasoline. we set caffeine mileage standards for automobiles, past the substances control act, the resource conservation and recovery act, the national forest act, we in fact launched a revolution in the way that america does business. consider just the clean air act, despite the coal industry, the automobile industry, the electric utility industry, the steel industry, and others, the clean air act passed the senate unanimously, and the house with one dissenting vote. when richard nixon vetoed the clean water act in 1972. the senate voted 52 to 12 to override his veto in the house voted 247 223. the difference between 1970 and 1969 was the difference between night and day.

change is not limited to the government. millions of people begin choosing their homes, their jobs, their cars, their diets, even choosing how many children to have, based on environmental values. why do believe the 2020 will be for climate what 1970 was for other environmental issues? because just as in 1969, we have a supersaturated social situation. every recent poll shows the strong majorities believe the climate change is real, and has a human fingerprint. the lavishly funded multiyear disinformation campaign funded by the fossil fuel industry, most notably exxon, has been thoroughly discredited. for many decades, every poll has showed the large majorities of the public favor a switch transition to 100% clean renewable energy source. as of 1970, the young people who will have to live with the problem are stirring. the friday for future strikes inspired by a 16-year-old,

greta sundberg, mobilized 1.6 million strikers in 125 nations on march 15. another international strike is being organized from may 24. in smaller strikes in individual communities are taking place every friday. the i ptc has taken off its gloves. each subsequent report has grown more forceful than the one before. the most recent one concluded that for there to be any reasonable hope of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, humankind must reduce our emissions by 50%, by 2030. that is as close to a clarion call for action as you will ever find in a responsible scientific report. pope francis, and a constellation of religious and philosophical and moral leaders are addressing climate change is a moral issue, not as a political issue. within 200 cities and states including california representing 1.3 people and nearly 40% of the global

economy have pledged to reduce their emissions by 80 to 90% by 2050. washington dc was pledged to be renewable by 2032, the most ambitious target in the nation. the solutions project has developed maps showing all 50 states and 139 nations can achieve 100% clean. the climate action 100 plus group, a group of pension funds, insurance companies, foundations, and other institutional investors, with more than $32 trillion of investments under management, by pressuring the 100 largest companies with major carbon footprints to align with their spending with what is needed to limit warming to 2 degrees. in a few companies, including some giants, like google, ikea, and mars, have pledged to swiftly achieve 100% clean. more than 6000 corporations now report their carbon footprints

to the carbon disclosure project, and once you begin measuring something, you can begin to manage it. public health officials, now routinely speak of climate changes and major health threats. reservation biologists, driver, yellow extension. the upbeat side of this the cost of battery storage is super stupid is over the past few years. in most places, 100% renewable energy solution is the not the cheapest, healthiest most resilient option, is on the -- the electric on will be a revolution launched by tesla is spreading like wildfire. a lot of companies in the world will have electric cars available by the end of this year. buses are fallen, mileage is increasing, and personal cars buses and trucks on the cusp of the resolution. a similar opportunity lies in taking green buildings to scale.

it generates more electricity for rooftop solar in seattle, the cloudiest major city of the contiguous 48 states, then it uses. it is the most comfortable welded building in the city, it has been fully attended, and has been operating in the black since the day it opened. this is not rocket science, this is not a design, it is a simply about priorities, it's about developers telling the architects, and there are contractors that i want this building to perform anyway that is responsible with the sustainable future. the goal is to invest deeply in efficiency and then electrify everything and produce all of that electricity from renewable sources. finally, what will the earth day campaign itself look like? earth day, which you should view as a meme, rather than just an event, will do its best to ensure that public consciousness is again saturated with climate solutions. regional organizes will catalyze coalitions in a for every major city here and

internationally to create their own events. we will work with national and state educational associations to get climate programs, focused on solutions, and to every school. our children already understand the threats. we needs to make sure they also know what is needed we need to make sure that they have some hope. we plan to enlist seniors, historically most social movements are powered by you. certainly that first earth day was. i was the oldest in the office, i was 25. many of those activists from the 1960s and 70s are now retired. our values are intact, we have got more leisure time than we have had in decades. some of us feel guilty about our failure to make progress on climate during the period that we were actually in power. i really pray for the emergence of a green gray movement.

we will work with partners to get climate solutions program into museums, libraries, zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, and athletic venues. and, met with soccer officials two weeks ago on the athletic venues, whereas with the smithsonian people to start an interest talk with about museums and zoos. the gap between the fabulously wealthy and the destitute has never been greater here and in most of the world. an energy revolution could consolidate even more wealth and even fewer hands, or it can be structured to remote greater equity. they will work with disadvantaged communities to help ensure the well-being of the poor in this country and the destitute of the world. to enlist the next generation of environment activists, we have to engage with social media platforms, and we will be jointly announcing a major year- long partnership with twitter later today. we also hope to work closely with instagram, interest, template, we chat, libel, facebook, youtube, and others that have not even been invented yet. we plan to enlist an army of digital natives to convey

poignant, funny, or otherwise memorable messages reaching the largest possible audience of their peers. project drawdown has bettered a variety of options for individuals to modify their individual consumption to significantly reduce the carbon impact, we have an alliance, a drawdown alliance with interview ei to reach out to a broad audience, to help them with their values. later this year, the network will release a citizen science app, downloadable to any smart phone. this challenge apple make it easy for anyone to upload answers to questions that can profit from crowd sourced data from around the world. and finally, vote is designed around elections and 60 other nations to make sure climate becomes a top-tier issue, one of the two or three issues in which people vote.

our aim is to achieve the d,, at the same time we are working with organizations to register new voters and make sure they turnout at the polls. the goal for the 2020 is to mobilize the broadest possible movement. it is designed to inspire hope, and people who know that their political and economic systems have been feeling the plant, but who if given reason to hope can be aroused to demand change. happy to take any questions or any of you may have. >> i'll go with the first question. you talked about vote earth, and the 2020 u.s. elections around the world. are you advocating for candidates, or policies, how is that going to look. >> you can address climate as a priority issue. for the last several elections, we try to get one question on, introduced into the

presidential debates and failed. this time we want to have a presidential debate that is devoted to, and some people don't give the broad rhetorical flourishes but how to address with some detail, what it is they want to do. we will be working with the wide variety of partner organizations, some of which are packs in force, and folks that endorse candidates, based upon the records and their pledges. we are a c3, so we are providing the context within which all of that can flourish. >> reporter: i'll get questions from the audience in a moment. but one more. i have seen some criticism of earth day among environmentalists, who say, it has become more of an event, celebration, and lifts of a real policy initiative, something like national ice cream day. it sounds like you are looking to change that. what you say to the criticism of what happened in the last several years? >> i think if you were to ask folks who are involved in movements for human rights, for

peace, for any number of broad social issues, whether they would like to have a worldwide event where even for one day, if the plaintiff focuses upon the issue, they are resignedly debated, but in the end, if you believe we are rational creatures and believe in democracy, that debate will produce good results. i think every one of them would leap at it. the environmental movement is blessed with this evening. to be sure many of the things it does are just introducing people to the issues, you take a sixth grader out, and they pick up and recycle some aluminum cans, and perhaps plant some trees, but that first step is a step is a long journey. i know a lot of people that planted a tree but then took the children out to see that tree, when it was 25 or 30 years old. this year they will take the children out to see that tree.

it is a right variety of things for right variety of people. but we want this one to have an impact beyond just the introductory impact. we have run out of time. it is time now to move aggressively. on climate. >> said she will be accepting donations on the restrictions because some energy clamp is are claiming they are all about dealing with the problem. >> the question for those who might not have heard, whether there are restrictions on donations, i suspect given our theme, we will not be having exxon and peabody beating down our doors to make contributions to us. if they do we will turn it down, just as we turned down a preferred contribution from

exxon back in 1970. if you take a look at the source of this contribution you say oh my lord, what were they thinking, of course we will turn it down. >> we may have already touched on this, are you working with conservation biologists who addressed the issue increasing extensions, people are very have great affection for their favorite species. i wonder if you are trying to leverage that, especially with children and museums and also just a follow-on question are you going to address the coke brothers, a sponsorship of the exhibitionists at the smithsonian and other national museums? >> the first question, will be the easy one first. yes, we are working closely with conservation biologists.

the principal theme this year of earth day, as you might have seen from the polar bear downstairs, is upstairs now. is on extinction. we now are facing literally an epidemic of extinction. it is proceeding at a rate that is approximately 1000 times to the background rate before the evolution of sapiens. it is caused by a variety of factors. but most conservation biologists would say there are two dominant, one is habitat loss, and the others climate change. and the two interact with one another. >> while we have seen a fair amount of coverage of all the beers and extensions, there has been somewhat less coverage of the impacts on human beings, and particularly on the destitute of the world, so we will also try to focus as much attention as we can, for example, gratian, places become

desecrated, and people can no longer live like in big letters and other coastal communities, they have to go someplace. that has caused other tensions that we want to queue up as a issue, not just a political issue. we are going to be working closely with a wide variety of museums. i don't believe that the coke brothers will be sponsoring anything that we are working with those museums on, and it is not part of our mission to tell the smithsonian whether it can take some amount of money from any source to talk about dinosaurs. what we are trying to do is to run an event around climate. >> i have another question. you are in the process of constructing the bullet, ahead of the bola foundation which you mentioned in your talk is going to be a very environmentally friendly building. i am interested in what you are

learning from that, that can be used in old buildings like this, you can't knockdown new york city and create a whole new set of buildings. are you breaking those lessons? not sure. first, let me be clear. we are not creating the bola center, it was completed five years ago. it has been characterized by world architecture magazines is a commercial building in the world. our tenants are not the sierra club and greenpeace, there are some wireless speakers intentional futures, paa, standard commercial tenants. despite all that, we use less than half of the energy per square foot of a leed platinum building. and in the claudius major city in the contiguous 48 states, generate for a sick story structure. you have got the same roof for one story, six stories, 30 stories, for a six-story structure produced more electricity than the building uses on an average basis. if we can do it in seattle for heaven sakes, what is up next.

what are the lessons, and i should say it is fully intended operating in the box, it costs no more than a conventional office building. it is a little bit misleading, because we don't have a parking garage for automobiles. that was the great savings, we are on a major public transit route back from downtown seattle. we found it for having a garage with bicycles, having rapid access to transit we have no difficulty getting -- the lessons are interesting, even in seattle which is a pretty green city, there were probably two dozen laws and regulations against building the kind of building rebuild. so probably the biggest challenge to this was persuading the regulators, and the city council to let us build a super green building. and, that will be our challenge throughout the country. i think once again, by mobilizing around climate, by making people understand that this is important, there is they are going to sweep away a number of those prescriptive regulations figure of

performance regulations. they will give a great deal of flexibility to creative architects and engineers, as long as they meet really tough performance standards. >> can you give us an example of what would have been barred? >> sure. this will undercut something i said a little earlier. about our roof. if you look at the bola center, looks like we are wearing a graduation motherboard, because our roof extends out over the sidewalks that surround the building. you got a lot of surface area, just simple geometry around the circumference of the building. that is all owned by the city. and the city, under american common law, whoever owns property, owns it from the center of the earth up to the full extent of the universe. so if you are building over a sidewalk, the city has to give you permission. the city wanted to charge us something like, i think it was $65,000 a year to extend our

roof over the sidewalks. we tried to say you have got these really strong promotional things encouraging solar energy, i doing that you are just making it impossible. we cannot be zero policy. not only that, it hasn't rained so much in seattle, our roof is actually going to be providing a public amenity. we got it changed. it is a lot of little tiny things. >> you mentioned in washington dc, it is committed to becoming 100% renewable. that sounds pretty ambitious to me, and a little unrealistic. is it possible? >> if you are seeing possible, technically i suppose, yes. is it highly probable? i much deferred to joe who actually lives here and undoubtedly photos that debate much more closely than i did. i read the news reports that you have done it. a lot of these goals are aspirational goals. it's the sort of thing that you see with a green new deal, which talks really about power, not about energy.

so typically in energy, that means they're talking about electricity. getting nervous and wishes for electricity, probably impossible for electricity. similarly, whenever you set something that sounds almost impossible, if you get close to it, it is a success. if kennedy's aspiration to get a man on the moon in 10 years have been a man on the moon in 11 years, by 13 years or 15 years, with that have been a failure? no, it was a grand goal that served to inspire people to move aggressively toward it. i suspect that is what is going on in dc. >> there is obviously an anonymous and out of average going on right now in society around the world, particularly among young people. that is nothing new to you. i know the birth of the first earth day was born out of

outrage, happening in the antiwar movement, as well as the average and environmental degradation. my question is, how have things changed? how do you see the role of young people changing around the world, your 25 as you see in old-timer, and your offices. he mobilized the first earth day, and perhaps even more, what opportunities are they really to channel this outrage into something meaningful, actionable, and deliverable. >> often the toughest thing is to get attention. what they have done with with these future friday's is to capture the world attention and doing it with student strikes, doing it with the lone individual sitting on a park bench in front of the united nations. even through the storms of december and january. and doing it by stepping out in

the traffic in london, and causing the moral london is a strong advocate to be a little disruptive. if you are a little bit late today, then let's change the policies, so we don't have to do this one of the things about being young, if you are both young, outraged, and hopeful, is that he will do what it takes . when you are young, you don't owe what is impossible. >> any more questions? thank you for being here, can you tell me about the epa and what we can do? >> there is a two-day conference starting tomorrow at american university on the future of the epa. i will have several bipartisan former epa administrators to will address the topic with detail and sophistication.

clearly, it has been catastrophic, the worst two administrators in history appointed by the trump administration. it is very funny, we are not considering what has gone on with the supreme court, starting to think us and gore such as the good core. it is hard. in the reagan administration, under and this became bleak. then he came back in and inspired the agency and brought new people in and revitalize them. >> when we passed the law that i talked about. they were brand-new approaches. we didn't know what would work. we assumed we would pass this. we applauded the things that worked in the things that didn't we worked on. after the reagan years things became

polarized and we were afraid to make modifications to make things better. we all concurred that things would get better. we use the opportunity to make them better. if we can create an election where the environment becomes a voting issue then we can go back and get the epa revitalized, and we can make sure that all of the laws won't be as superb as we thought they would be. we often alienated people who should've been friends. >> i don't want this to be the last question but, some people think nuclear is a viable alternative with the new technologies . what are your thoughts? >> okay, well this is one of the cases where there is a

dream out there that people have for the future that is being used to sell something that doesn't exist. what they are trying to sell is reactors. america cannot rely on any technology that they can't share with the rest of the world. there is no way to do this for the current generation without having significant weapons being part of that. these are nothing they are doing that is a part of the fuel cycle. there are some react is that would make proliferation difficult would burn up most of the waste and none of them exist. they are just things on paper. the community would you find it guessing. i think the sensible answer to that is

simply, without getting into the morality and the plutonium in the waste storage and potential accidents. again, as they proliferate around the world, i think economics and timing will be the driving factors for the foreseeable future. we can put up a wind turbine in a few years. we can put the solar panels out. from the time you decide to go ahead, it will be between 10 and 20 years to build a power plant today. we haven't solved this problem. >> i'm wondering if you are working with the national government situation and the mayors. they are more

receptive to climate action. >> pretty much the closer the government entity is to the people the stronger it tends to be. the greatest commitments have been at the city and state level. i am on the board of this organization and i don't know about all of the staff contacts. i know we have had some outreach and i know we will be reaching out to the governors as well. but here, moving at all levels of government, the real emphasis is on people who are here. >> let me give you one small example. this is different in some ways. this is regarding building a circular

economy. earth day in its early days was put together in communities as ecologists as part of their budgets. that meant the people put their tin cans or aluminum cans or newspapers or glass into the backseat of their automobile and drove it to different locations. you were spending more energy than you were saving. it was something that people did. we had to have curbside recycling. so when this happened in 1990 and they decided this would be a theme, we found a couple of cities that have a good curbside recycling program going. we got those ordinances in wheat took them and said in a couple of years there will be a big earth day in your city and it would be nice if you could about something as a big victory. these are two ordinances that work. if you look between

1989 and 1992, just an explosion of curbside recycling programs and an increase in materials recycled. that is because we made it easier for them to do it. i say all of that was a huge change. this was was a great idea. now people are prepared to separate out the things that can and should be recycled. >> what is your take on development goals and are the earth day goals and lined with those. >> the sustainable development goals which are better- known elsewhere in the world that they are the united states make a great deal of sense. they have with them the equity dimension that creates an emphasis

that i refer to as well in my remarks. they also contain a dramatic commitment to a renewable future and it is in line with what we are trying to do. the secretary- general of the united nations famously said that moving progressively on climate today is not only a moral duty but we are in alignment with that. >> can i go back to recycling. >> are you concerned about the future of recycling based on china not wanting to purchase our recyclables. >> we should never have been doing that. we should send them across the pacific ocean. we should take care of it ourselves. the reason that they want to move it is because of contaminated stop. they were able to use it. we had containers full of recyclable materials that went to a landfill in china and they got

fed up with that. gift we are going to be moving to a true circular economy we need to address it in a more comprehensive way than curbside. in many cities, including half of seattle, it has led to putting all of your recyclables in one container. and then they use something to separate it. that has a work. mainly because people recycled glass in the same containers. glass breaks and contaminate the rest of the trash. so anything that have glass and it becomes waste. we had to do this in a way that is more sensible and comprehensible. that is our theme that we are working on. we will get back to circular economies in the future. do you have any more questions?

>> i'm going to take a moment to let you all know about some upcoming events tomorrow at noon. we will have larry, the top economic advisor here. on friday we will have the founder of panera bread. on may 2, in the evening, we will have in event called night out. this is a nationwide event. it is to help raise money and awareness for a journalist was being held in syria. you can come to the restaurant here in what you spend will be donated to a fund. you can also look on the website and find a restaurant near you. please go there and look for a place to eat on may 2 to help out the journalists in need. thank you for being here.

thank you. >> that is all it said in plain english. what it really meant is this is secured.

>> i think people in general want to go to see and understand wherever that may be. on the surface of the planet or above it or to the moon. whatever. i think it is within us to have this will and desire to explore. >> later on the presidency. he will talk about the sense of humor of abraham lincoln. >> riding through the woods he met a lady on horseback. he waited for her to pass but she

stopped and scrutinized him before saying, you are the homeless man i have ever seen. >> he said yes ma'am but i can't help it. >> no i suppose not said the lady. but you may stay at home. >> this weekend on american history tv. >> before we move on to the supreme court may i say that 10 topics that you really need to know. write them down. foundations, federalism, public opinion, participation, political parties, interest groups, campaigns and elections, congress, president and courts. those are the big 10. the entire test cover those 10 topics. >> are you a student preparing for the exam, don't miss church chance to be part of the

cram for exam program. >> our question is about the significance. >> this is one of the words our students struggle with too. the idea is if you are trying to get a big bill pass, sometimes it helps to have some quid pro quo quote. if you add this, sometimes we call it earmarks. if you added you will get more supportive boats. >> this is the annual cram for the exam.

>> this is our first time entering this. we were very excited and >> it is our first year entering something. we wanted to see how far we could go. and to think we did this on our first trifles my mind. kathy castor

talks about climate issues. the affordable care act in campaign 2020. she chairs the committee on the climate crisis. you can watch on sunday on c-span. >> on sunday a q&a on the latest book. two people will be contributing. this will be sunday at 8 pm eastern. a summit on healthcare costs and innovations including a discussion on the affordable care act and proposals to address additional healthcare needs. eight political strategist will participate. it is three hours and 40 minutes.