i would say that speaker boehner and republican leaders, every piece of evidence i see, are interested in moving an immigration bill forward. the chairman of the house hasciary committee indicated that the senate bill is not the vehicle to this problem. he has indicated an interest in pursuing it. i do not think you see this we are not interested at all. what you see is a desire to find a better fix than the one they saw that came out of the judiciary committee in the senate. i would not brand republicans in a negative way. areleadership in the house interested in finding the right answer to this issue of immigration. >> do you think we will have a bill by the end of the calendar year? am happy to answer any questions you present to me except ones that will predict

what happens in washington. that is what you do. it is conceivable that we have an immigration bill. it is way too early to say that it will or not with much certainty. >> i would earn a lot more money if i could predict. >> without making any areictions, the states going to have senate elections next year. there are not obvious candidates. states where you have open seats. they see that they have not been competitive for quite a few years. tom harkin has been here since 1984. max baucus retiring. talk to me about those three things in particular. will we see strong candidate on your site?

what would be the strongest? i will probably decline to mention names in those three states. withe working closely folks back in those states. and talking about potential candidates in all three states. we are talking about montana. iowa, michigan. those are real potential for us. montana in particular, you look at the presidential race in which governor romney soundly defeated president obama. a good republican states in the iowa is a much more purple states. you have a republican senator from the state. recruitment there matters. it is certainly a ok's.

-- a focus. we do better in places like michigan and non-presidential years. those three are certainly ones have potential.nterest it goes back to where we started in the beginning of this program. hard at making certain that we have a good candidate. we have not talked about this, and i generally believe that elections are won and lost at the state level. how do you appeal to the voters of your state is the most important thing. there are national trends. about the six- year of a presidential term. out ofrage number of in the six-year of a

presidential second term. this is exactly the new year that republicans need. this has arisen in washington, dc. and makes it much more difficult for there to be anything but a move toward the republican side. me down aboutin recruiting candidates. you certainly can have this conversation with the democrats who indicated that they were going to have been in place for nearly a two-year time frame. the places they talked about, they have been unsuccessful in south dakota, west virginia, kentucky. they have had a difficult time.

i contribute this in part to the circumstance we find ourselves in with a president that is so partisan and moving them. there is this continual scandal with the iressa and with the reporters. with the department of health and human services. this makes it more difficult for and when to recruit elections. >> we will leave it there. thank you for joining us on "newsmakers" this sunday morning. >> i appreciate it very much. >> what does he get out of this job? >> he gets an opportunity to bolster his national profile.

from hisome goodwill colleagues in the senate, certainly from senate leader mcconnell. he will have help with the state and any future ambitions he has with in the senate caucus. ,> going back to immigration which is one of the centerpieces of the agenda, there seems to be a different track between the house and the senate. s aree senate republican trying to build a big win. this is not what speaker boehner or cantor walk. it is with the younger members of the house republican conference. they are the ones who drive the debate. if john boehner is going to bring a bill to the floor, he needs to bring a bill that can achieve what he calls the

hatchet girl -- rule. if he passes it without every a majority, you are seeing a refresh of the challenges that we saw earlier this year. of this.a sign you have an ad state senator. i think ultimately he and senator roberts will do this when it comes to the floor. the fact that he is still saying he has to be improved. marco rubio said it has to be bolstered. it reflects that all of the senators are still having to pull off this. >> it is akin to raising the

retirement age. it will lead to a primary challenge. jonathan martin, joining the new york times later this month, we appreciate you being with us. thank you for being with us. thank you for ruining us. -- joining us. today on c-span, steve milloy, talks about the conservative view of environmentalism. followed by remarks from charles. later some of the commencement speeches from around the country. >> now steve milloy talks about the sustainability movement and his own career working in the energy department. he is also the author of several

books. he spoke at the 25th anniversary of the national association of scholars and is introduced by the group's president. >> it is my pleasure to introduce our luncheon speaker, steve milloy. he is a prolific author on such things as health care scams, epa cleanup standards, the nuclear power industry. he is a biostatistician, with degrees from johns hopkins, also an attorney with degrees from georgetown and the university of baltimore. he has concurrent positions at the competitive enterprise

institute, the center for security policy, and the american tradition institute. he has appeared in "the wall street journal" and is a commentator on fox news. he is the author of five books, including his most recent, "green hell." as the many writers present here know, authors are not always responsible for the titles of their books. editors and publicists have a hand as well. i am not quite sure whether the all-out frontal assault on environmentalists in the title of the book was his idea, but it might well be. he is a pull-no-punches guy when it comes to the efforts of some environmentalists to invent what they cannot know to extrapolate beyond the bounds of reason and to sew fear based on imaginary dangers.

i will let him demonstrate all of that in his own inimitable style in a few minutes, but before i unleash steve, i want to present a context for why i have asked him here today. environmentalism is a relatively new topic for nas. there's no mention of it in the early volumes of academic questions in the 1980's, and only a few passing glances in the 1990's -- the topic was not in focus for nas as a source of campus mischief, comparable to efforts to dismantle the core curriculum, the politicization of science, and so on. wait a minute. the politicization of science? yes, that was a longstanding area of inquiry for the nas, but nas somehow failed to register the affinity between activists

and environmental alarms. that changed in october of 2007, when nas bumped into the university delaware's documentation program, which forced hard-core leftist ideology on students and sent those who resisted to what the university itself called the treatment. [laughter] the foundation for individual rights in education, fire, did a splendid job in shaming the university of delaware into dropping the program, temporarily, it appears, while the nas worked behind the scenes. as the dust settled, it was pointed out that delaware program, which focus on

sexuality and race and had little to do with environmentalism, was, according to its internal documents, a sustainability program. to the extent that word means anything at all, what it means to us is warmed-over environmentalism, but we were wrong. we wondered why it was called that and began to tug on that thread. we soon discovered that the word "sustainability" was a term of a much broader scope than it sounded. to its main proponent, the word designated a combination of anti-free market economics, a collective struggle for a social justice agenda, and an anti- fossil fuel environmental agenda, frequently pictured as three circles overlapping and sustainability as this center of the overlap.

this is not the place to talk about how this applies to higher education, but nas continues to be the only systematic effort among higher education watchdogs to track what the sustainability movement is up to. for a while we called it how many delawares? we devoted a special issue on the movement. we created an online encyclopedia, adopted a policy statement, and published over 100 articles on our website about the movement. the topic fronts on the debate over global warming, and here comes a disclaimer. the national association of scholars is not going to weigh

in on the substance of scientific dispute, and we have members on both sides of that debate. when it comes to the science of global warming, we are resolutely in favor of good science, transparency of methods, open access to data, and a peer review process kept free of intimidation. the existence, consequences, causes, possible remediations of global warming are not our subject, but the misuse of science to advance a political agenda, any political agenda, is very much our concern. one last prefatory remark and i will turn this over to steve, steve is here as a white knight. in our original planning i intended this luncheon to feature a debate between myself and a leading advocate of the sustainability movement in higher education. over the months, i contacted all the sustainability giants, and one by one not one of them would accept and invitation to debate their agenda. some were busy, but one of the tactics of the sustainability movement is its insistence we are long past the point where there is anything left to debate. the science is settled. catastrophe is imminent. the time for discussion is past. the time for action is upon us.

dissent from any of these declarations is worse than intellectual folly. it is a kind of treason. that train of thought, you might call it the sequestering of recent inquiry and the shunning of evidence that does not fit the narrative, is the signature of a dangerous ideology. it is why the national association of scholars has taken up this issue and why we will stick with it, and here to explain how the movement has planted itself in academe is steve milloy. thank you. [applause] >> good afternoon. it is an honor to be here today. i want to thank ashley for remembering me from a couple of years ago when i met her. it takes an amount of courage for a group that calls itself the national association of scholars to invite a guy from a

website called junkscience.com. peter asked me to talk about the sustainability movement. it is incumbent upon me to explain why i might be qualified to pontificate on the serious topic of sustainability. who is steve milloy? why am i here? in the spirit of national association of scholars, i have spent time in school myself. by the time i was 30, many moons ago, i had a graduate degree in biostatistics, and i had worked as a computer systems engineer for wall street firms. i worked as a lawyer for the sec.

so far you are not seeing the connection between me and the environment. until i was 31, there was not one. i made up for that. in 1990, i lost my job for the second time. desperate to find a new job, i got hired by a washington lobbying firm. the firm was run by the man who advised ronald reagan to classify ketchup as a vegetable in the school lunch program. while that sounds silly, my boss knew how the government worked, where the bodies were buried, and he actually buried some. he hired me because as a lawyer and a biostatistician he felt i had good skills that he thought would be useful in the field of

environmental risk assessment. my lack of knowledge was apparently not a problem. as i have learned over the past 20-plus years, hardly anyone knows anything about the environment. i got lucky. i was thrust into the assignments that dealt with broad issues about pesticides, radiation, secondhand smoke, epa, fda, health regulations, and i worked on a project to get george h. w. bush to issue an executive order to tell agencies like the epa how to mitigate risk. i became so knowledgeable about environmental risk assessments that i successfully pitched to the u.s. department of energy to hire me as a consultant to help them fight the epa. why would the department of

energy hire an outsider to fight a sister agency? the epa was pressing the department of energy on cleanups for the its chain of weapons laboratory, like oak ridge, sandia, and others. the epa also wanted energy to vacuum its nevada test site. epa wanted the department of energy to vacuum up the top one inch of soil, decontaminate it, and replace it over a vast area. this work was projected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars 20 years ago. my project was to review u.s. government environmental policies to determine if they had been developed on the basis of science or politics. this was great for me, and i spent the next year studying environmental policies. we interviewed hundreds of people, government agencies, activist groups, trying to get to whether policies is based on science or politics. in the end we produced what i thought was a fantastic report which concluded that environmental policies across the board are based more on politics than science. i sent my report up the chain of

command at the doe for review so we could get it published. i was excited and proud. everything came to screeching halt. i was called to a meeting and was told my report would not be seeing the light of day. he implied that if i knew what was good for my future contracting business, i would follow orders. there was no criticism of my report related to me. i was told to put a lid on it. even though i was a political novice, it was easy to figure out the problem. although my project started under bush, it was completed under clinton. as far as the clinton administration was concerned, what i did was incredibly politically incorrect. the environmental movement and

epa was sacrosanct and not open to question. what they did not count on was that i do not care for authority or their organizations, so i said goodbye to my career as a beltway bandit, took my report, and published it. i pitched it to "the wall street journal." i related the story not because of what i was about today to tell you about the sustainability movement, it comes from a career's worth of trench warfare, combat with the epa, the environmental movement, and their victims. let's talk about sustainability. what is it? its basic conceit is we only have one earth. that is true. if we use it up or pollute it beyond recognition, there will be no earth for tomorrow, but we cannot use the earth up tomorrow either since we will need it the day after. since we need to use and pollute at least part of the earth to make it through today and tomorrow and into the day after, we need to figure out a way to ration our use of the earth so we do not use it up and pollute it all at once.

rationing of the earth's resources is sustainability. while the theory of sustainability appears to have a great deal of intuitive appeal, reality of sustainability is quite different. in all the years that i have worked on environmental issues, i have only run across one example where the concept of sustainability was actually test driven. it almost was. in the mid-2000's, i managed a publicly traded mutual fund. taking a page from the environmental activist book, we bought shares in companies that were being assaulted by radical environmentalists or had already been captured by them. one of these companies was the investment bank of goldman sachs. in 2005, we discovered goldman sachs had used about $60 million of shareholder money to purchase 800,000 acres of land at the bottom of the world at tierra del fuego, and then donated the land to a green group called the

wildlife conservation society. we took our complaint to the goldman shareholder meeting, which was the last one for hank paulson, a fearsome wall street personality who was later treasury secretary. we turned a 10-minute meeting into a one hour nightmare. paulson was not only the ceo of goldman sachs, he was also the chairman of the nature conservancy. paulson's son was a trustee of the wildlife conservation society, the group that picked up the acreage. that was only the tip of the iceberg. we learned the whole sordid history of this tract of land and its nightmarish intersection with sustainability. the land had been purchased by a washington state timber company named trillium.

the ceo of that company turned out to be rather green for a timber company ceo. he had purchased the 800,000 acres nine years earlier to save it from a japanese purchaser who trillium outbid the japanese,and bought the land for $200 million, and announced it intended to do the world's first sustainable logging project. trillium hired respected foresters to develop a plan that was hailed by conservationists as visionary. conservationists are distinct from environmentalists. in short, trillium said it would harvest only a small portion of the trees and put some parts of the tract permanently off limits to logging. trillium invited the environmental community to bless its plan and invited people to implement it as well. trillium worked with the nature

conservancy, which at the time had a board member named wendy paulson, hank paulson's wife. while the nature conservancy pretended to help trillium with its project, the rest of the environmental movement formed a global alliance determined to stop trillium. lawsuits were filed. trillium persevered. nineawsuits went on for years, and in the end trillium emerged victorious from the litigation, but it was a pyrrhic victory. trillium had weakened to the point it had filed for bankruptcy. raiseum was unable to money, and hank paulson and goldman sachs acquired the land. you might think that the goldman sachs would take the

forest, a multibillion-dollar asset, and log it for itself. instead, hank paulson gave the land, worth billions of dollars, to the wildlife conservation society and took only a $34 million text deduction. when this was brought to the attention at the meeting, the directors fined paulson $100 million, but the dirty deed was not unwound. today the 800,000 acres remains unproductive. trillium had anticipated revenues of $150 million annually from its project. instead, the wildlife conservation society is now trying to figure out how to develop it as a site for eco- tourism, which is pure foolishness. the sad tale is the reality of sustainability.

it is only a notion, the purpose of which is to fool people to think that environmentalism exists on a higher moral plane than the rest of us. it is the environmentalist that are thinking of and planning for the future. otherwise the rest of us would just wreck the planet for future generations. sustainability is a con, a fraud. the real essence of sustainability is denial, saying no, no, you cannot cut trees down, no, you cannot use fossil fuels, no, you cannot use water. you're not even supposed to be. when i started working as a consultant, one of the huge environmental controversies was trash. consumption and waste disposal was not sustainable, because the environmentalists said we were running out of space. 20 years later we have more people buying more stuff, creating more waste, even with all the recycling that goes on,

even though we are throwing away more than three times the than we did 20 years ago. we have a huge surplus of landfill space, which is why it costs so little to have your trash picked up and disposed. giving the reality challenge environmentalists friends the benefit of the doubt that they were concerned about the scarcity of landfill space, we can only conclude they made the same mistake that a demographer made in the late 18th century. it was projected that population growth would outstrip food production and that ensuing famine and starvation would cut population down to size. what was failed to be foreseen was the development of knowledge and technology that would greatly expand the food supply so that never-ending surpluses of food are actually what happened, not famine and starvation. we will jump forward in the

timeline to the woman who is credited with launching the modern environmental movement, rachel carson. carson warned that the continuing use of chemical pesticides would decimate bird populations. of course, it never happened. in fact the great bird populations that carson said were threatened were actually on the rebound when ddt use was at its highest. the bald eagle was not on the verge of extinction in 1960. it was on the verge of extinction in 1916. ddt had nothing to do with the fate of any of the great birds. ddt was banned by the epa in 1972, a ban that was exported worldwide, and since then tens of millions of poor people have died from malaria around the the nexthel carson

great sustainability scaremonger was paul, he published the population bomb in 1977. he predicted that millions would perish from thin and starvation. to avoid this advocated, among other things, that the government spent drinking water with contraceptives. he fretted that also use was unsustainable because of carbon dioxide. he was al gore before al gore. he turned out to be wrong. that is a topic for another discussion. even though population fear mongering was entirely wrong and because environmental models are so beyond change he went on to bet julie and simon the prices befive metals tend towould scarcer and cost more in 1990 than 1980. as each metalbet

increased in that 10 year period. president obama's top giant -- top science giant helped him kick the metals. let's talk about some sustainability knicks and realities. we hear from environmentalists that fossil fuel is not sustainable. if you are not complaining about air pollution and global warming, we will simply run out of fossil fuels. the air quality reality is that we learn more fossil fuels than is as clean and safe as it was before the industrial revolution. is a separate discussion with hours and hours. suffice to say that over the past 17 years we have admitted more than 500 billion tons of

carbon dioxide into the up 7%here, they have gone or 8%. everyone agrees there's no change in global to mature at that period. we've dispensed with air pollution global warming. are we running out of fossil fuels? the answer is an emphatic "no ." other technologies are making it possible to recover more oil in previously tapped of formations. humanity has used about one trillion or so barrels of oil. just recently at least two hundred billion barrels of oil were discovered and the australian outback. that may hold one trillion barrels of oil. now we bring in hydraulic , it has been an

energy game changer. in the last six years we have went from a natural gas imported to a natural gas and porter. itces are so low that danger's the viability of the u.s., which has 700 years of reserves itself. the new york times recently reported on the shell formation -- it has been an estimated to hold three trillion barrels of reserves. i'm not saying we're going back to 50 cents per gallon of gasoline but that is growing. we are not running out of fossil fuels even without water. lauder's the most abundant substance in the planet. troutthere is occasional but there is no way we are running out of water. we may need to figure out to get water from where it is to where it needs to be but there is

plenty of water. we may have to import water from canada, which holds 20% of the world's fresh water. we may have to rethink how we do storm water management. we may have to say goodbye to minor species of fresh fodder but it-species of freshwater fish -- minor species of freshwater fish. not want tont does give them water. sat -- we the plane may end up paying slightly more. there is water. daily question that remains is whether the environmentalists will allow us to access it. that is eight stability problem. let us talk about population. there are two aspects to this question. first, while environmentalists love -- people take the back seat. tens of millions of subset -- of sub-saharan africans have died

from malaria. 8 million children die annually from vitamin a deficiency. now that we have developed biotechnology biden and 80 enriched golden rice many of vitamin biotechnology, a enriched cold rice may help this. it might be sustainable for those poor children who are dying from vitamin a deficiency. it is the no. 1 -- the number one killer in the world is poverty. all around the globe efforts to improve basic living standards among the poorest people are routinely blocked by environmentalists. abouteat friends worried global warming, not because they are interested in preventing a disaster but so they can use the notion of letting to advance their political cause in the u.s.. demi-god,h, our green

is still a member of the prestigious national academy of sciences. he said the ideal global population is around 1 billion to 2 billion. that was 45 years ago when the population was already double his ideal level. who is going to step off the planet? his problem is they the people as burdens on the planet. the rest of us know from experience that paul ehrlich is dead wrong. the second aspect of the population sustainability issue is a real sustainability problem that sustainability at kids have entirely overlooked. that problem is the sustainability of the welfare state. --the 1940's 40 workers today it is less than three workers. in the interim not only to reject social security wages but

we have other environments like medicare and obama care. our sustainability friends have been pushing bush -- have been pushing birth control and abortion. i would suggest to you that the welfare state be a sustainable and continue the war against reproduction. finally, let us talk about the sustainability movement in college campuses. college campuses of the perfect breeding grounds for environmentalism and sustainability. you have kids in secondary school learning nothing. the they have learned from internment amounts to little more than political correctness. fact that the academics to research environmental issues, more than likely get grant money from press sustainability. kids going to college not knowing anything about the environment and are not likely to graduate. possibly worse than not learning anything is colleges taught

dogmatically. we must minimize the use. groundg a shovel in the destroys the local ecosystem. what is not talked is a sort of critical thinking. the way i look at environmental issues is by asking questions. learned that pesticides for a cancer risk. i then ask a question, "how do theknow that tobacco assertion was they did not know what the couple was a problem or not. you have that bad combination exploited by outside education and radical environmental book .- radical environmental groups the key right now is the keystone xl pipeline, which

would bring oil from the canadian province of alberta. the environmental movement is apoplectic about keystone xl. since they hit fossil fuels the last thing they want to see commercialized is this. --ause most people in environmentalists have been forced rely on their last line of defense, the college green movement for street theater against keystone xl. a middlebury college professor that radical access group is funded by a fossil fuel hares. he started the fossil fuel movement on campus. they had the largest global warming rally in history. --k on the campuses

pressuring universities to divest in fossil fuel. we are trying to equate fossil fuels with archives and even slavery. it's true. because no talk is complete without a slight al gore. >> at harvard university of course said if he was young he would be educating along with them. a week or so ago al gore said he to selling his current tv outages era. what is to be done about radical environmentalism on college campuses? as young adults turn into adults

will they grow up? will they move on from dalliance is with this flagrant nonsense. process -- ine the business of predicting the future. did the college radicals of the 1960's grow up? some did but many didn't. the ones that didn't now run the country. >> the intellectual corruption of college campuses does have a core -- does have consequences. not plan colleges for this travesty. we have of this happen. at the risk of overgeneralizing we conceived by the people across the spectrum left and right. divide theafely political spectrum left and right. .hat is their profession they want to manage and russian society and they do it on a full-time basis.

since the beginning of the progressive movement the left has spent time capturing institutions like universities. by now the left has captured virtually every major societal -- including publicly traded corporations. we have led to happen because they want create the wealth they have distributed. adding 10 or 15 others in the senate bill as a movement of a full-time basis. against dozens of major environmental organizations, each with scores ofstaff's and billions dollars of funding, all working to rebate society as they see it -- if i were a mouth to some i would say we are all doomed. all that is nearly lost.

unforeseen technology has helped us avert one disaster. but phyllis skeptics and i are frustrating the agreement from capturing control to carbon emissions regulations. we could not have done it without the internet, which like the crane press did years ago ended the control of news and information. much i cannot know how longer this small band of skeptics can continue to roll along. i encourage all of you to get involved in whatever way you can. nothing to do it can be inconsequential. i urge you to, talk about this decision. sustainability movement is not making sure there is enough earth left for people to live on in the future. it is not about saving the polar bears. about every aspect of our lives. these people want to tell you where to work, where to live,

to live, how much electricity, what kind of food you should eat. green-approved a toilets. we are implementing light bulbs. in california the greens tried to ban the sale of dark colored cars. you couldn't even have the color car you wanted. it is really as free aspect of your life. united nations had to sustainability program called agenda 21. it is a plan for a 20% 3. i wish i had power plants. you will get a mostly yellow and orange that of the united states. it lays out how the united nations 2021 plan would restructure policies in the

united states. it is all yellow, orange, and red. except for a little bit of green. for a natural born imposing controls on my life is no labor. i understandably became incensed. i urge you to become incensed as well. thank you. [applause] do we have time for questions? >> a couple of hand-held microphones. if you want to ask a question raised a hand. some will find a way to you. >> any questions?

>> as i recall from my visit many years ago, it belongs to argentina. >> the 800,000 acres was part chilly and part argentina. are they players in this are they up billy accepting the fact the effect a away wood block the way to do real estate. >> they are remarkably a prepared to deal with sustainability. i believe is behind it started north face. the home -- benign adding societies are corrupt we

can make things go with money and money goes a long way. they do not really have this strong a sort of planned price movement we have here in washington. needsk this country switch. there's a lot of literature on the other side. there are literally dozens of books representing a position consistent with force. >> i have a very dear friend in texas, we talk about this. he knows everything there is to know about everything. that is the problem. we know what is wrong. we're too busy doing other things.

the other side is not spending time learning about anything. they just act and it works. >> would you comment about glorious mayor? second, what is he likely to do with his foundation on this front? >> i would say michael bloomberg is new york city's personal tragedy. adding he is way off base with his in and ian on salt entrance of saltth his nannying and trans fat. given the sierra club $50

million and they are using that money to go around shutting down coal-powered power plants. right now natural gas is cheap but it is a very spiky history. you never know what you are going to get. bloomberg is a problem on national level. last week he gave a speech where he said kohl is dead man walking. coal provides 40% of our electricity. we have a lot of money we can do a lot. >> i am wondering what role of mars corporation plays in this debate.