>> over the next few hours here on c-span, this year's american renewable energy summit. first, the author of more than 50 books, including the great transition, and then the conversation from climate change. after that, if freshwater crisis in the u.s. and around the world. later, a look at environmental impacts of large-scale farming. tonight, the funeral service for ben bradley, who died in october at age 93. one of this peters at the funeral was carl bernstein, who

talked about threats at the white house at the washington post was reporting on watergate. >> december 20 third, 1972, about 9:00 p.m., i reached john mitchell by phone, about a story we were running. he said he had controlled a secret fund for undercover operations such as watergate. mitchell was quite upset responding several times as i read him the story. he then proceeded to threaten an important private part of katharine graham's anatomy which he said would get caught in a big fat ringer if the "post" printed the story. he said we are going to do a story on all of you. he hung up the phone.

i called ben at home. woodward and i did much -- did not much observe the chain of command. ben interrogated me. had mitchell been drinking? i could not tell. did i properly identify myself? yes. did i have good notes? yes. ok, ben said, put all of mitchell's comments in the paper but leave out ms. graham's -- tell the desk it's ok, he said. a top official of the knicks on -- nixon campaign called me a few minutes later to make an appeal that mitchell had been caught in an unguarded moment. he has been a cabinet member and so forth. he doesn't want to show up in the paper like that. the official then called bradlee at home to repeat the appeal. bradlee recalled saying which just boils down to this

question, whether mr. mitchell said it or not. whether the "washington post" reporter identified himself as a reporter, and if he did that all my requisites have been satisfied. mitchell's comments state in the paper. >> you can see all of this. >> new year's day on the c-span networks, here are some of our featured programs. 10:00 a.m. eastern, the washington ideas forum, energy conservation with david crane. cake love owner warren brown, an inventor dean kamen. at 4:00 a.m. eastern, the brooklyn historical society hold a conversation. then, the apollo seven astronaut on the first manned spaceflight.

before noon eastern, author hector on the 33 men buried in a mind. i 3:00 pm eastern, richard norton -- richard smith. then, a former investigative correspondent for cbs news on her experiences reporting on the obama administration. new year's day on american history tv on c-span3 at 10:00 and eastern juanita abernathy. then, taverns in prerevolutionary new york city. then, patrick trust 10 presidential caricatures as a historian discusses the president and some of their most memorable qualities. new year's day. for our complete schedule, go to

c-span.org. >> the new congress in january will see the largest house gop majorities in 1920 elections with 247 republicans and republicans take the senate majority with 54th beats to 44 with the democrats and two independent to the caucus with the democrats. the oldest member of the house of representatives will be john 85 years old here first elected in 1984. the youngest is the new york republican representative, 30 years old, and elected to her first term this past november. the american renewable energy summit was held in colorado earlier this year. up next, two keynote speakers, we will hear from the author of more than 50 books, shifting from fossil fuels her first term this to solar energy and wind energy. and the fun on animal and plant

species that are going in -- are going a think. -- extinct. [applause] >> thank you, chip. thank you for organizing are day. thanks for the invitation to come back again. my topic is the great transition. the great transition is a shift from coal and oil to solar and wind. and most of us know about a little solar energy and a little wind farm there. but things are happening very fast now. i think we're going to see about a half century of change

compressed into the next decade. and we're going to see a complete restructuring of the world energy economy. a decade from now, the principal sources of energy in the world will be solar and wind, not coal and oil. so it's coming and it's coming very fast. just to give some glimpses of the new energy economy that we can now see at various places in the world, last year denmark got 33% of its electricity from wind.

in the month of december, it was 55%. it is the first country to get a major share, the major share, of its electricity from wind. but it's not finished. the goal is to take it up to 100%. portugal, spain and ireland are moving fast, with 22%, 18% and 17% of their electricity coming from wind. in spain, interestingly, wind has emerged as the principal source of electricity in the country. and it has overtaken nuclear. in south australia, wind farms are replacing coal-fired power plants and doing it very fast. in china, wind-generated electricity has not only overtaken nuclear-generated electricity, but if you look at the curves, the nuclear curve looks like this. the wind curve looks like this. it's just a runaway now. it's exciting to see the other largest economy in the world now moving so fast toward wind. there are seven wind megacomplexes under construction in china. each of which will have at least

10,000 megawatts of generating capacity. that's 10 nuclear power plants. the largest, which is not surprisingly in mongolia, a particularly wind-rich air, -- area, will, when it is completed, have 38,000 megawatts of generating capacity. 38,000 megawatts is equal to the electricity consumption of poland. this is not smalltime, marginal additions to the world's energy supply. this is big-time. we've not seen anything like it. and we've not seen any other energy source, including coal and oil and nuclear scale up to the levels we're seeing with wind, for example, with 10,000-megawatt wind farms. it's a whole new ball game. in the united states, iowa and south dakota are the leaders in

wind electric generation, each getting about 20% of their electricity from wind. iowa wants to take this to 50% within the next four years. it may become the first u.s. state where wind becomes the primary source of energy. i should say, of electricity. how is this revolution happened? how has it managed to move so quickly? incidentally, there was supposed to be a clock here some place, a timer, and i can't -- where is it? if you can see it, that's fine. the advances have come from government policies or indeed -- r&d subsidies, from environmental groups. the sierra club launched, in the beginning of 2010, a beyond coal campaign in this country. at that time, we had 530 coal-fired power plants. their goal is to close every one of them. and so far, they've closed 140. so the 530, now down to 390. their goal is to close every one

not later than 2030. and then we say, well, what about china? well, china is moving very fast. the coal trusts in china faced with the shrinking use of coal are on the verge of bankruptcy. there are six provinces in china which have set their own coal-reduction goals. they range from cuts of 5% to 50% between now and 2020. these are individual provinces simply picking it up and saying basically coal has to go, and we're going to do our part. there are also a number of cities around the world who are pushing for 100% clean energy, like san francisco, wellington new zealand, just to set a couple. so a number of cities are setting very ambitious goals goals much more ambitious than the goals of the states in which they are located. what about india? india is a major source of carbon emissions, heavily reliant on coal for electricity generation, for example. but it's shifting. they have now designed in india

solar-driven water pumps that are much cheaper than diesel pumps. indian farmers currently have 26 million diesel-powered -- is that ten minutes? oh, good. they have 26 million diesel-powered irrigation pumps. and the plan is to replace every one of them with a solar-powered irrigation pump. and save a lot of money in the process.

the payback time on these solar-powered water pumps is from one to four years depending on the situation and

depending on the situation and from how far down they're pumping the water.

i mentioned earlier, the scaling up that we're seeing with wind farms. we're also seeing the same thing with solar cells. solar cells can scale up and they can scale down. they can scale down to this little strip on my watch that provides the electricity to run it. and they can go all the way up to 200 megawatts, 200 megawatts. there's really no limit to the size. and there are close to 100 of these large plants being built now in the southwestern united states. at the end of last year, the world had 139,000 megawatts of solar-generating capacity. that's equal to 139 nuclear power plants. but it's growing by an extraordinary rate. between 30% and 70% per year. one of the most exciting things happening now is actually an economic development where rooftop solar panels generating electricity are now producing electricity cheap enough to not only compete with but to undercut the local utility. and what happens in this situation is, as more and more people learn that a rooftop installation of solar panels will provide cheaper electricity than the utility, they begin installing them on their homes. then for the utility, the market begins to shrink. so they have to raise their prices. and when they raise their prices, even more people put solar collectors on their roofs. and it's called a suicide spiral. but there are many utilities now in this country, and elsewhere in the world, particularly in germany, where they've invested very heavily in solar cells, the two largest utilities in germany are really on their knees. their net market value for the two of them has dropped 56% over the last four years, which says

something about the market's assessment of utility-generated -- mostly coal generated -- electricity.

so the markets are beginning to pick up these changes. in 2013, 33% of denmark's electricity came from wind. in iowa and south dakota, it was 25%. texas is pushing hard on wind. last fall, a block of nine mid-western states got 20% of their electricity from wind. the state of oklahoma, in october, got 32% of its electricity from wind. i'm getting these examples and these glimpses just so we can begin to see what's happening. i mentioned china's seven wind complexes. i mean, this is bend generation on -- wind generation on a scale we've never seen before, when you talk about 10,000-megawatt plants at a minimum and some going up to 38,000 megawatts. there are four states in north germany that get half of their electricity from solar cells. and then the exciting thing about having a rooftop solar generator is that you cannot only run your household, you can

also run your car, with solar energy. you're going to need an electric car or a plug-in hybrid, but they're coming. and this also is going to be market-driven and it's going to move much faster than people think, for the simple reason that the cost of electricity as a fuel is about one-third that of gasoline. and that's going to become clear, i think, the more and more people in the years immediately ahead -- clear to more and more people in the years immediately ahead. we have seen an interest for several years now in using corn for ethanol. i'm not sure that's the best use of land. if you have an acre of land growing corn, you can produce

$1,000 worth of ethanol. but if you put a wind farm on that acre of land, it will generate $300,000 of electricity. so we can begin to see where the balance of -- where the advantage lies as we look ahead. i mentioned iowa. one sort of wild thing about iowa that reflects the extraordinary piece of

agricultural real estate we have in the u.s. midwest, iowa produces more grain than canada. and at the same time, more soybeans than china. that's a double wow. but it -- i mean, u.s. midwest is why the u.s. is the food superpower in the world. there's no other country close to us in terms of production and exports and part of this is the good fortune of having inherited some extraordinarily productive soils. what about nuclear power? i have two minutes to go. what about nuclear power? nuclear cannot compete economically. the technology is there. with eknow how to do it -- we

know how haud it, to do it, but the costs are just not there. so it's not the technology. it's the economics that has led to the decline in both u.s. nuclear generation and worldwide nuclear generation. both are on the way down. nuclear is on the way out. i don't see anything reversing that. we've seen a number of things contributing to this transition. one is advancing technologies have lowered the costs of solar and wind energy.

another is mounting public concern about climate change that sort of underlies the thinking and the shaping of policies in this area. and we've seen some people with money, a lot of billionaires really begin to plow money into renewable energy. warren buffet. $15 billion a couple years ago. more recently, another $15 billion going into wind and solar development.

oil refineries, a lot of them, there's just not enough demand for oil to keep them going. so a lot of those are also going to be going. final point. chevron, exxon mobil and shell invested $120 billion last year in trying to expand oil production. with that $120 billion investment, they only succeeded in preventing further decline. they were not able to increase it at all.

the stock market is not looking favorably at the oil companies. the s&p 500 index went up 40% last year. sorry. over the last three years. exxonexxon, mobile and chevron went up 11%. shell went down 2%. when i see the oil ceo's now, they don't quite know where to go. it's an entirely new world. instead of the companies expanding, they're actually shrinking. it's an indication of the kind of thing that we're going to be seeing in the years immediately ahead, and i'm not talking about 20, 50 years from now. i'm talking about the rest of this year and next year. the energy transition -- i call it the great transition because it's going from fossil fuels to solar and wind energy -- will be the defining element of our time. this is a historic development. thank you very much. [applause] >> one of the most important developments in modern human history. now i'd like to introduce mike phillips. he is one of the gentlemen who have been keeping his pulse on the biodiversity conversation. and mike comes to us from the turner endangered species fund. i'm really looking forward to your presentation. thank you, mike. >> right here. >> i'm good. good morning. i'm going to dive right in

because 15 minutes is not a lot of time. i caught my first gray wolf 34 years ago. not long after that -- that's not supposed to be the first slide. that is. there you go. ok. not long after that, i had the good fortune to lead a red wolf to the southeastern united states. this little female, known as 344, was the first red wolf born in the wild in many decades.

after that, i had the good fortune in the effort to restore gray wolves to yellowstone national park. after that, i had the good fortune to saddle up with ted turner and his family to launch what has become the largest private effort in the world to redress the extinction crisis. i wish i could say that -- well, i've been involved with the extinction crisis since 1980. i wish i could say that i didn't have much to say to today because the work was done, but that's not the case unfortunately, have you ever heard of whipples, or narrow cat's paw, tennessee ripple shell, diving beetle, easy yellow-faced bee, true pig toe? all of those are species that have gone extinct in the recent past in the united states. have you ever heard of martha? that's martha. martha was a passenger pigeon.

she died at the cincinnati zoo at 1 p.m. on september 1, 1914, at the ripe old age of 29. martha was not an extraordinary passenger pigeon. she just happened to be the last. passenger pigeons were fan fanatically gregarious creatures. consequently, they were very easy to kill. the decline happened fast. in the early part of the 1880's, big flocks, including millions of birds were known. before the end of that decade, groups of 200 were noteworthy. the last wild bird was shot by a 14-year-old boy in ohio on march 24, 1900. after that, the species was only known in captivity. and martha was the last of that crowd. upon her death, martha's small body was frozen in a block of ice and shipped to the smithsonian. ironic, isn't it? billions of passenger pigeons have been killed with no attention to their biology or their anatomy or their ecology. but upon her death, martha's little body was seen as precious, in accord with the

scarcity theory of value. like other extinction crises the one that we're currently involved in operates across a massive scale. every year, thousands of species and attendant interactions fine-tuned by time and place disappear at the hand of man losses so severe that the redundancy is being stripped away, exhausting the lives of millions. without doubt, the current extinction crisis is one of humanity's most pressing problems. and on par, on par, with the five great waves of extinction that have swept across this planet since multicellular life first arose a billion years ago. the first extinction crisis occurred in an era about 440 million years ago. that event emptied the oceans. the fifth crisis occurred during an era, about 66 million years ago.

during that crisis dinosaurs disappeared in a geologic instant as an asteroid measuring about six miles across slammed into the earth, traveling at 45,000 miles per hour. the sixth great extinction crisis began in the latter part of the 18th century at the onset of the age of man. like all of these waves of extinction, ours is characterized -- if you want to define an extinction crisis, it's characterized by untold numbers of species disappearing around the world. these aren't isolated events. at a rate that greatly exceeds the normal geological rhythms of life and death. during an extinction crisis, all

bets are off. the normal darwinian-based rules of survival of the fittest those rules become irrelevant. the change is brought about by these waves of destruction, so fast and so complete that the very notion of darwinian fitness is rendered moot. speers that survive, this is important, species that survive an extinction crisis are not so adapted as simply lucky. think about the power of a destructive force that's so overwhelming that survival of the fittest that tried and trued approach for life marching in the direction of persistance is rendered totally irrelevant. imagine so, forces so powerful that the whole of living nature, the whole of living nature with the wisdom of the ages has insufficient time, resources and know how to adapt. what then are we to make of the sixth great crisis before us. it's most important to note that

it's not a speedings a steroid. but rather it is us marching in this direction in a most powerful way to do one thing, domestic kate the planet. that's what's driving this crisis as we speak today. what does this have to do with renewable energy? well, i think the extinction crisis above all sells a call for changing our relationship with one another and the planet earth. why is the extinction crisis the call? because it's loud and it's clear as all calls must be. it certainly allowed problem for those who will willing to listen, it's almost deafening. i can imagine there's a bell that rings endlessly in the heavens marking the passage of yet another miracle. it's certainly clear it provides clear evidence unquive cal

evidence that something is amiss. be mindful over the long sweep a billion years of multicellular life that have been five events that rival the extinction crisis that we're in today. if that's not evidence that something is amiss, then i don't know what amiss means. we understand the cause of extinction crisis, it's human induced habit degree gredation, and over the last few decades climate change. so, you wonder what does this have to do with energy and energy policy and renewable energy? well, if we can mainstream renewables as a way for redressing the extinction, the redressing the climate change problem, it will double as a redress for the extinction crisis as well. the transition that we should consider should align us with the great thoughts of the thomas berry who imagined a transition

from a period of human devastation of the earth to a period when humans would relate in a more beneficial manner. we need a transition to heavy reliance on renewables a transition to a rest rative economy. where all of the cost of production distribution and consumption are accounted for today. we need a transition to fairness within and between scombrenrations, a transition to peace amongst ourselves and all other creatures great and small. the growing momentum of extinction crisis makes clear we're running out of time. soon we won't have anything to transition to. without immediate and systemic changes we are not going to have a world that we're proud to give to our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. a step in the direction of necessary change would be to redouble our support for the federal endangered species act.

increasingly it seems that it is incable of doing anymore than buying time of the permanent losses are registered. what do you do? on behalf of the endangered species act? i would first thank your lucky stars that you live in a country where votes matter. then i ask that you elect officials who are willing to work to remedy the extinction crisis. remedy misguided fossil fuel energy policies that are increasingly favor a few at the cost of many. the degraded condition of our bio atmosphere screams out that we redouble our efrlts in all aspects of politics and policy. we must be part of a movement that puts a stop to politicians flagrant disregard for science on matters of great importance

like bio diversity conservation, energy policy and human welfare in general. now i know and you probably do too that we are imagining a massive mission to affect that great. massive missions always require a mastery of politics. there is simply no other way to marshal the resources. we could more fully master politics we could more fully ensure a certain transition if more of us showed up to serve in elected office. now you may agree that the world is run by those who show up but you're not the least bit inclined to show up in serve in the world of rational politics. i found that politics is not all that irrational. i served in the montana legislator for a decade. it's not an irrational world. it's a world defined by a bunch of knuckleheads but they're not irrational. more importantly i've come to

believe that at its core our political system favors folks like us. it favors people that believe that facts and knowledge and scholarship and determination matter. why do i believe this in this age of hyper partisanship? because in the way our country was founded. during the the years depr 1787 to 1788 they recognized there was no way to establish a republic that resolved the problems related to the rights of the federal government versus the rights of state governments. there was no way to resolve the problems related to the rights of women. the rights of native americans, the rights of slaves. at the time of our nation's founding, those problems were insolveable. so our founders created a political system and political parties as institutionalized channels for ongoing debate,

which was permitted decent to be regarded not as a tree treasonnable act but as a legitimate voice. the enduring genius of the constitution is that it provides the frame work for debating questions endless less if need be. we will not succeed in ending the extinction crisis. we will not succeed in making renewable energy a foundation of a new energy future. we will not succeed in any efforts to make the world a more peaceful, proser if rows or just place for all creatures great and small unless we more fully master politics. by winning more debates, by winning more elections. in 1990, following 27 years of imprisonment, nelson mandela

spoke 11 words that ended apartheid. he said we can't win a war, but we can win an election. in 1994, he became south africa's first black president, and with that, the end of the policy of apartheid. we can win more elections. and by winning enough elections, we can ensure the conservation of the wonderous diversity of life on earth, and that is a critically important part of the great transition before us. thank you very much. [cheers and applause] >> more now with a group of scientists discussing climate chain and the increasing number to the category four hurricanes. from aspen, colorado, this is 45

minutes. >> good morning. i hope you're ready for some climate science, and i know you're awake because those were two great presentations and we're happy to follow that. it's good that you're awake because i'm going to put you to work. instead of just listening and instead of me asking questions of the panelists at the end of their presentations i want you to do the asking. i want you to be thinking of questions during their presentation. so please write those down and be ready to engage in conversation at the end of the presentation. so, my name's cindy schmidt and i'm with the united nations foundation. those are two institutions that are funding my project which i would like to plug because i think it could be a good resource for all of you. it's called climate voices, the website is cly nate voices.or

dwnch and this is a network of scientists across the country in all 50 states that are going to their local communities and are willing to talk to any group within those local communities about climate science, about climate change in those communities and about what can be done in the community. so please go to climate voices.org and take a look at that growing and developing project. so this morning i am delighted to be here with three distinguished scientists. we're talking about climate science and the current state of knowledge of climate science. as you all know, it's not just the atmosphere that we're worried about. this is a real sort of jigsaw puzzle of land, water atmosphere and two of our presenters this morning are going to address the state of

knowledge of that science, and then our final presenter will talk about possible solution that addresses all of those land, water and atmosphere. so we'll get started on that. greg holland is going to be our first speaker. he's a senior scientist at the national center for atmosphere i think research in boulder and his academic career is in tropical meteorologist with a focus on weather and climate extremes and the relationship between the two. and you'll hear from his accent that he probably is not from brooklyn. susan avery is going to be our second speaker. she is president and director of the woods hole ocean institution and we are lucky enough to have her on two panels. she was on one yesterday. some may have heard her then. the institution is affectionately known as huey. and susan used to work at the university of colorado as

administrator and faculty member. dennis bushnell is going to be our fine speaker. he's the chief scientist for nasa langley research center where he's responsible for oversight program for the formulation for several technological areas and dennis holds several patents for various inventions and has contributed much work on the area of bio fuels and bio mass as patroleum replacements. please remember to think of those questions and we'll start off with greg. >> thanks cindy. can i have the slide and someone was supposed to get me a clicker rment >> do we have the clicker? >> i'll just tell you to go to the next one. you can see the title up there. >> oh, that's the clicker. >> i must be sitting on it.

>> that's the clicker. >>' the title up the back there i don't think we'll be able to live up to cindy's expectations because i don't think i can give you a summary of the state of the science in the next five or 10 minutes. but what i would like to do is make three points. those three points are firstly what actually is climate change, and the second point is how our extreme weather and climate systems responding to their climate change because at the end of the day it's the extremes that really matter. and thirdly, how can we actually work with society at large and how does working with society at large hope both, not fixed but actually let us adjust to them and become more resilient to those changes but to let them

understand how they can do their jobs better. to start with the first one which is climate change, if you look at most newspapers and things like that you see this lovely curve that goes up in a steady lie near basis until about about now it goes off like this. that's only partly true because if you look at the carbon dioxide in the air which is the main greenhouse gas that is changing, it's going up like that. but the warming did not go up like that, because up to about the 1960's we were putting another gas in and air sols into the air. remember for those who were the same color hair as i have you can remember the smoke stacks and acid rain and all the major eco logical problems we were sorting out then. then we cleaned it up. what had happened before then was those sulfates were cooler and you had them warmer and

cooler and they were to some extent largely canceling each other out. so the warming that we're actually seeing is because we cleaned up the smoke stacks. it's now ack sell railted quite rapidly. so when i talk about climate change that's what i'm actually speaking about. with regard to extremes, there are problems with understanding and being able to predict what happened to extremes for one very simple reason, they don't happen very often. and so there's a big noise level, very hard to get a statistical signal. but there are some fundamentals that you can't get away from and that is if you make any changes to the overall distribution, the means and the way the distribution looks, the biggest change is always at the extreme. there's another story to this as

well because those extremes actually have other limitations other than climate change. for example, the most extreme thing that can happen is usually happens because it's basically used up all the energy there is. you can drive your car, maybe 500 miles, maybe 600 miles, but at about 700 miles it ain't going to drive anymore unless you put more fuel in it because you have used up all the energy. the atmosphere works just like that. if we look at hurricanes to start with, this is what has happened with hurricanes. the bottom access is the number of categories, where categories one, two three, four and five you're aware of, zero is tropical storms. up on the other curve is a proportion relative to all hurricanes so relative to all hurricanes. if you just focus on the little area on your right hand side here, back in the 1960's and 1970's when we cleaned up the smoke stacks we had a curve that came down like this.

every decade since then has actually bulged up, you can see there's been a bit of an increase out to the category five area but the big difference happens at the cat category four. the capacity to intensify has gone up very rapidly. this is all published information. so it's not that we're going to have super hurricanes, that's the good news. the bad news is we've now got twice as many going onto two and a half to merely category four and five hurricanes as we had before and it happens globally, that's the global result. it also happens to happen in every ocean base in every pacific. so that's something we're living with now. let's look at temperatures. as cindy said i'm not from brooklyn, i'm from the dipe south country down here. in 2013 we had a horrific summer with january actually was the

hottest we've ever seen. indeed, there were several days in january where the temperature exceeded 40 degrees sell see yuss, for the whole country, not just at one station. and there's a lot of talking about it and everything else so we decided we would go and have a look at it. it's actually interesting because this is the temperatures in this particular case on one day, the really high temperatures you can see greater than 42 degrees. you can see the cooler temperatures around the coast and things like that. where do you think the records were set? well we can do this two ways, i'm going to show you another slide and say what happens if i apply another 100% of greenhouse, in other words double the greenhouse for that situation, what do you think will happen? here's what happened if i double the greenhouse. this is the change, as you can see we've got around three

degrees change in those areas across the country. let me, i can't go back, i won't go back, if you remember the area, there was originally all the hot up in the center of the country, all of the changes down here thank you, and that's because what happened is the extreme temperatures haven't gone up. the temperatures needed the extreme of going up in frequency. same with this happening with a hurricane. this is also a limitation, it's really hard to get extremes higher there's not enough feeding in greenhouse warming to do that. what we have seen happen is this. we've seen some unintended consequences there, looking further north, maybe a little bit hotter, maybe cooler, but it's mostly nothing or a bit cooler. the bit down in the southwest is because of particular peculiarity of that month. this is something i haven't thought about, if a continent as a total is warming up, the

summer monsoon gets more intense and you're bringing more cold, tropical air, cold and welt tropical air down into the northern region. these are the sorts of uncertainties you read about in the paper and people say look you don't know anything. so that's my second message. my third message goes to how we can actually interact with folks with you, in a particular way interact with several groups and i'll mention them in a second. but i want to show you a slide. here's a slide it's an old slide deliberately so and you look at it, you can say that was pretty well a disaster. not hard to look at that and say something really bad happened there. what do you think it was? well here's the headline that goes with that slide. bloody great took out the town

in the near by area. my point here is that if we're going to actually say what's happening with climate change, there is another element to the case and that is that we can't just be building buildings in a more rigid more extreme, we're able to go another hundred years without falling over because they will. they will for a whole bunch of reasons we don't understand. so we've been working with groups such as these, the engineering for climate extremes partnership and rising voices, you heard about rising voices from my colleagues in the native american community yesterday. what we're doing is trying to get a dialogue going where we can actually say hey this is what's happening and we need to work out how we can work with you. i'm going to give you one example which goes back to the picture above that's come out of that which really makes a big difference to how i do science but it's making a big difference to how i do planning as well. that is the con set of graceful

failure. we're no longer talking about hundred year return periods for a building. we're still talking about it but we're no longer focusing entirely on that. we're saying what happens if the building falls down, or the dam breaks, or the vat of molasses blows up. what you do is build the consequences and recover from that into the planning process. so if it happens, here is what we need to have as part of the healing process to make sure we can recover. that's what i call resilence. it's becoming a bit of a buzz word now, i'll sure you'll start to hear a lot about it. but i want to go further since we're here and talking about alternative energy. i absolutely and utterly support alternative energies and we have to go to renewables let me start by saying that. indeed there is no doubt that if we took all of our current

energy requirements and the growing energy requirements of india and china and the rest of the world, they're the two big gorillas on the block and turned them all into wind and solar power we would make permanent and unknown changes to the climate. it may not necessarily be global but it will be regional. when we cleaned up the smoke stacks we did it for very good reasons. let's say we just simply took all of the energy for the united states and turned and used wind farms to do it. you can't take that much energy out of the wind systems of the world and not make some changes. it's not just going to happen in the united states, it will make changes elsewhere. if we make the entire sahara desert green, to bio energy, we'll grow trees, whatever we

decide to do there, it will change the climate of the world and it has. there is an example because the global sorry, the nile valley was once a very fertile region. it dried up and that happened in conjunction with the on set of the summer monsoon. so all i want to do is simply say the three points i hope you'll go away with, firstly look carefully at what you mean by climate change or what is meant by climate change. extremes are going to happen and in my view have already happened. i show cloud an example. thirdly let's kick the dialogue up, because i think there will be great things to come out of it. thank you. [applause] >> thank you greg. i think greg really set the stage for what i want to share

with you. again, i think, how would you start this? i guess you do. what i want to do is talk about the fact that this climate system, this jigsaw puzzle that was eluded to as more come ponets to it. a lot of time there are more focus on what's happening in the atmosphere and not realizing it's an atmosphere ocean land humanity process that's going on here. so i want to talk about finally some of these intersections of these complex things. what's happening in the arctic and the triple whammy of what's happening in the ocean in terms of a warming ocean and the increase of dead zones in the ocean and what those impacts are. the triple wammy is affectionately called in the popular vernacular as the warming souring and gassing of the oceans. so i'm showing this slide again because i showed it yesterday

and several people wanted to see it once more. a lot of time when you look at the planet in space and you see all this water and you think oh it's not going to do anything, it's not going to change. but in reality if you drain all this water off the planet the amount of water that you really have that really is a major part of our plan tear system is quite small compared to the volume of the planet itself. the amount of fresh water you have is that second dot there that's drained off the larger blue and then the smaller dot is the amount available fresh water. so since the next panel is really talking about fresh water, i just thought i would show this again because it gives you a perspective of how precious this ocean is and the water that we have on this particular planet and it's a critical part because the ocean is the fly wheel of the planet. it's the memory of the climate system that holds the capacity

of heat and in fact i'm going to show you a slide later on here that shows that most of the heat the extra heat that has gone into the atmosphere as a result of excess ar bon dioxide is being taken up by the ocean. let's start with the sea level rise. on the west an arctic ice sheet and glaciers, because this is some of the latest sign science coming through is what's happening there in terms of the melting of the ice sheets out there. this is an animation i'm going to show, produced by nastnass and it's mostly covered by ice. but recent that showed basically that the ice is feeding into and pulling out of the west about arctic is actually speeding up. so what i'm going to show you is the animation of that process the flow coming in and the flow coming out and it's color coded. the red in this color coded

animation basically means faster glacier flows that are happening. if we go to that and i do that here's your western, we're zooming in, so you see the inlets there that are coming in and the outlets of the glaciers that are going out. glaciers are basically rivers of ice that are happening here. so what science has basically showing you is what's happening here. what's happening here is this warmer water, what's happening in the about arctic is basically coming up under neat the floting ice shulls that we have here. as it comes under these ice it puts up a grounding point of the glashese that basically grounds the glacier in place. as it erodes the grounding place, the grounding point basically moves landward and it's not as secure and the

glacier begins to fall and surge forward out into the ocean. so this is the process of this complex interaction between a warming ocean and its ice that is basically cascading and melting and putting ice into the water and eventuallyally melting the ice. now the amount of sea level rise could be attributed to a melting -- just estimate to about 10 feet of sea level rise perhaps more. so what does that mean? 10 feet of sea level rise. let's put it in the context of new york city. this is new york city. and i think the first thing you can see is that you're completely unundated three metropolitan airports, ok? 10 feet of sea level rise might occur over a hundred years or so, there's some estimates of that. but in the short term, 10 feet of sea water inundated new york

has happened and it already has happened. it happened with sandy. sandy basically was a combination of sort of the small amounts of sea level rise that we have already combined with a storm at a relatively high tide period that gave you two and a half foot storm surges that inundated manhattan. so these things can happen, this intersection of what's happening on a longer term time scale to our climate system along with these extreme events that one is seeing in terms of weather patterns. it can easily produce surges like this that we're going to see in the short term. the point is, not only are we going to need to worry about mitigating -- and clearly climate science is telling us get off fossil fuel as much as possible, but there is also an adaptation strategy in terms of the engineering of our cities and infrastructure that we have here. adaptation strategies, you can retreat. can we retreat new york?

i don't know where it's going to go. maybe to colorado. we can accommodate. we can raise these cities. certainly, in the 1800's, we raised chicago and seattle. but heck, it was a lot easier to do in those days than it is today. or you can protect. there's a lot of debate on, how do you protect? do you protect with harder infrastructure, building walls and seawalls, or do you protect with putting our self-defenses back into place, no longer building on barrier islands, putting back and restoring our mangroves, restoring wetlands. there's a lot of discussion going on in coastal communities about exactly how they're going to approach this problem, of a combination of both soft strategies to adapt as well as hardened strategies. so let me go to the arctic, the loss of sea ice is certainly a sentimental feature of climate change in the arctic.

you've seen this graph before. but the point is, it's not just the sea ice area that's important. it's the volume of the sea ice. and increasingly, what we're seeing. the arctic is much, much less long-lived ice, age-old ice, four to five-year-old ice, and almost all the ice is becoming single-year ice, which melts rather quickly. there's an uptick in 2013, but this is an anomaly, you see a lot of wiggles there. our point is that it may have in increased the area of ice for that year 2013 but it is still one-year ice. now, arctic ice has an interesting -- well, let me stop a minute. this is basically a tipping point with respect to geopolitical issues. in what does it mean in opening up the arctic? and opening up the arctic in certainly has a lot of economic potential,

has an economic potential in in terms of fisheries, in terms of shipping lanes, in terms of oil and gas and other extraction. and you know companies are looking at this. i think one of the greatest fears from an oceanography point of view is when, not if an oil spill is going to open, it is when an oil spill is going to happen in the arctic. and it's not going to come from probably drilling for gas and oil. it's going to come from shipping. if you look at what the response was for deep water horizon and i getting down there and trying to clean up an oil spill in an area which is basically mother nature's pretty kind basically, has a lot of ways to help clean up that oil spill, compared to what is going to happen to a pristine area that we know little about scientifically, with no real physical ability, easy physical ability to get there, in an easy way, and how to clean it up.

so there's some real important sort of adaptation strategies or thinking through about the security of what's going to happen in the arctic as this becomes an ice-free area. of course, there's the geopolitical consequences and economic values that they have. interestingly enough, the boundary lines between the u.s. and russia have been well established as a result of the cold war. but it's the other nations that are still arguing what's going on here. >> finally, i'm going to skip this. i'm just going to go to the you triple whammy. that is, as carbon dioxide increases, that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is dissolved in the ocean. that means the ph decreases and you have certainly a major habitat consequence associated with that. this is the whole process. in an there is a lot of research

and in and in and a relationship and between ph conditions and healthy ecosystems. clearly, one of the problem areas is the habitat loss of the coral reef systems and production of mollusks and ability to function. that is the acid issue. the warming issue. the ocean is warming. okay? most of that heat content is in the ocean. this just shows you the fact that the ocean, the heating we have from the carbon monoxide is ending up most in the ocean. if we didn't have an ocean it would be a lot of a heck more atmospheric heating right now. that is buffing us right now. the growing oxygen minimum zones in the ocean, my last slide, first this is the surface of the ocean absorbing more heat, warming up.

you aren't getting as much oxygen down into the deeper parts of the ocean which is pretty critical because that different part of the ocean is disassociated with the atmosphere in that deeper part. the only way the lower levels of the ocean are going to get oxygen is through the mixing process. warmer water inhibits that mixing process. you are basically enhancing the ocean minimum zones in the deep ocean and they're going to spread. that has tremendous implications for marine animals that require oxygen such as the tony:. tuna. requires oxygen. they live in the deeper parts of the ocean. without oxygen they're going to run into some trouble here.

it does, though, provide a wonderful habitat for jelly fish. if you want to have jelly fish we may have lots of jelly fish because they thrive. this accounts for what we're having on coast with the nurent loading from atmosphere -- basically run off, your pharmaceuticals, whatever, in the coastal regions, it causes the plankton to bloom and pull the oxygen out of the coastal waters there. as you have these minimum zones increasing in the deep ocean coming up into areas of coastal areas where you already have additional stresses associated with neernt loading you enhance the dead zones in the ocean increasing and we are seeing this as well. so you are this complex feedback system in the complexity of an ocean-land atmosphere system of which science is becoming -- really beginning to come to grips with.

we are at a stage where i think it is really important to make that investment in r&d that really looks and studies these complexities. this gives us the information to adapt to a changing world. [applause] >> thanks for that overview and statement of some of the problems. >> if i could have the charts please. folks yesterday said we have to do something very different and what you're going to see is very different. this is the salt plant, grown on waste lands, deserts, using sea water irrigation to solve land water, food, energy, and climate affordbility and soon. all of it. there are two types of plants. fresh water plants and then halophyte, salt water plants used for food and fodder in

india and other countries for hundreds of years. a goodly portion of the sahara is capable if we plowed it up and irrigated with the mediterranean and grew halophytes with direct sea water irrigation of producing sufficient biomass to replace all of the carbon fuels, provide petro chemical feedstock and all the food anybody wants to eat while returning much of the 68% of the fresh water we're now running out of for direct human use. i.e. solves land, water because we're substituting salt water to grow food, solves food because we're growing food. solves energy because we're producing biomass and biofuels at about $50 a barrel. the climate because we're sequestering some 18% of the co2.

so conventional wisdom for agriculture -- salt is bad but with this salt is good. 97% of the water is sea water. we won't run out of it. it contains a massive number of important minerals needed in the human diet which we've just about depleted out of the land. 80% of nutrients required for agriculture in proximity to a large number of desert and dry areas. 40% of the land worldwide is waste land, has a lot of sun light and barackish/saline ground water. you don't have to pump ocean water. you can pump saline ground water. in the sahara there is one that is absolutely huge. we can utilize these to solve our problems.

the characteristics of this wasteland, halophyte sea water no asoshable salt buildup, produces a cooler surface, produces fresh water, rain downwind. in the sahara, you could put rainfall back in the middle east and regrow the cedars of lebanon and stop the desertification of the sub sahara. we have a plethora of wastelands and sea water to solve what we have now. there's about 10,000 natural halophytes and 25% of the irrigated lands now perfected because the aquifers we're now pumping , including the one down in texas and oklahoma are in fact becoming saline. the characteristics, the yields can be equal to this and it produces the entire spectrum seeds, fruits, roots, tubers grains, foliage, wood, oils, berries, gums, resins, pulp, rich in energy, salt penalty, 35% saline water already grows this

stuff. use it for food, fodder, biomass, energy, petro chemical, feed stock, wood, co2 secretion and wildlife habitat. for centuries there's been a successful saline brakish water agriculture with no buildup and 22 nations are now growing halophytes for food and fodder. wastelands are a massive possibility to do this. western australia, persian gulf, middle east, sahara, southwest u.s. including west texas, and the anaconda in south america and many others. the current efforts in the u.a.e. -- boeing is growing halophytes for airplane fuel. i worked with the state department. there is an operation down there -- farms in northern mexico

are growing fuel. there are several others that are in the formative stages. so utilize the opportunity -- the opportunity is utilizing wastelands and deserts inexpensive land. utilize sea water which is extremely pottable and inexpensive. grow halophytes, massive amounts of food and biomass for petro chemical food stock and green fuels while sequestering about 18% of the co2 affordably with existing technology. start now. 10 to 20 years up you fix land water, food, energy, and climate. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, dennis. thanks to all three of you for those great presentations. do we have questions? yes, john? >> the presumption which i think

we all share is that climate change is real. my question is about application of your science to reality being that we have a gubernatorial election coming up in which one candidate says that climate change is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated and the other who claims to be a scientist saying the science is unclear. so my question to you all is what can you do to affect the leadership in this state and what can we do to help you? because our governor claims to be a scientist and claims that there is no significant proof of aspergenic caused climate change. it's just crazy. i know your objectivity keeps you in a certain realm of being scientific but there is too much at stake. we need advocacy and we need to support that advocacy. [applause] >> i'll start off. you heard yesterday that the

climate change politics is driven largely by the financial aspects in the real world. and recently the renewables are punching through a parity, and so the financial business is in fact becoming very successful. half of the new generation worldwide is now renewables and one of the previous speakers this morning went into this. okay? so it's actually not the concern about climate i think, which is going to change things the way some of us would like to see it go. i think it's the favorable financial aspects which are just about here. >> you talked a little bit about other countries being involved with halophyte development. do you see that in the u.s.? do you see some attention to that now in the u.s.?

>> yeah. halophytes in the u.s. were actually started out of university of arizona. there is a major effort in the university of delaware. d.o.e. down in oak ridge has some halophyte work. we are, you know, becoming far more successful with this. the entrepreneur that actually started the major sea water farms operation in the horn of africa and is working now with united arab emirates came out of arizona. >> greg, you wanted to address john's question? >> yes. very quickly, i spent many years working diligently with politicians and i woke up after a while i was getting nowhere. it's not because they're idiots. they're actually very smart people. they have an agenda and it's driven by two things. it's driven by the people in

this room and they're also driven by who gives them the money to get elected. you have to simply understand that. you can do all of the logical arguments you like. you are running up against that political reality. a few years ago we started not to do that. that is where for example the rising voices and engineering for climate extremes came out of. let me give you two examples of where that is now affecting the political process. first, the last rising voices meeting, americans wrote directly into the presidential system saying, here is what has to happen. it's no longer me talking about it but all the indians in america and hawaiians in hawaii doing that. that's what they listen to. the second thing is that the financial industry gets a bad rap as we saw in many cases but the insurance and the financial industry again working with people like us have actually come to a united nations agreement. we're starting next year.

every company in the u.s. and other parts of the world that have shareholders, in other words publicly listed, has to put in their sensitivity and their problems that they may have with climate change and severe weather and similar things that come out of it. the world is moving in that direction not because the politicians are taking us that way. because the people that elect the politicians are taking us that way. >> and let me just add to the conversation a little bit about voices. i mean, scientists are a small percentage of the population. it's your voices that have to come through. let me just tell you a little bit about massachusetts. maybe you can actually concretely look, tell your gubernatorial people, look what's happening in massachusetts. so in massachusetts, there has been a very concerted effort to put in place an agenda for a green economy, green and blue economy.

the governor has done it. the state legislature has done it. there are resources that have been put into investments that have been done. we are beginning to see results already in terms of economic development. this is where you have to -- you have to talk about it in terms of financial terms. you have to talk about it in terms of human terms. you don't talk about it in terms of science terms. there are things happening here in colorado that shows the climate is changing. regardless of what you, if you believe in it or not the climate is changing. we have to get away from this business of basically just talking at the scientific level and instead casting it in terms of economic development, human stories, and basically what's happened to the environment as a whole. massachusetts has had success years in a period of five years. take a look. go on the website. talk to people there. in i have been on their committee. even dr. later.

-- you can talk to me later. >> a question from mr. bushnell. halophytes sound too good to be true. many of the middle eastern countries that struggle with food have lots of money. why does the list not show saudi arabia for example? it sounds too good to be true. convince me that it's not. >> i have worked with the saudis. the saudis called me up and said they're worried after they run out of oil what's their economy going to be? i worked with the people in the province of alberta for the same reason and i asked whether they had any sand. i asked whether they had sea water. they had sea water. i said, have i got a deal for you. the last time i saw the saudis were going down the street looking into halophytes. the middle east was on my chart. that's one of the major areas. again, for energy. >> one more question.

>> my name is steven hoffman. i'm really honored to be here. i live in boulder. i work in natural and organic foods and i'm working on the colorado ballot initiative to label g.m.o. foods in our state. i was very curious when you brought up the dead zone because it's actually caused by agriculture driven by genetic engineering and is all the synthetic nitrate fertilizer that just poisons the water of toledo, ohio. call that a dead zone too because it's an algae bloom. it's caused by g.m.o. agriculture. we think g.m.o. agriculture and conventional agriculture in general contributes 30% of the greenhouse gases to global warming. interestingly enough -- and i'm very interested in your halophyte conversation because according

to rode al institute organic food and farming puts so much carbon back into healthy living organic soils that it can actually sequester more carbon than is being released in our atmosphere. so there actually are open source, low cost solutions to sequestering carbon and it has to do with agriculture. agriculture as we practice it today which is why we want to label g.m.o.'s is because that agriculture has killed the soils releasing all the carbon into the atmosphere and is really contributing to climate change. thank you very much. [applause] >> one more question. behind the podium. >> we work on world peace, and a lot of the issues that are going on internationally, i wanted to

ask about as scientists that you are, what is your thoughts on fukushima and how come the government doesn't tell the truth? i'm talking even about the u.n., the effects of what's going on with fukushima, what's going on in the pacific ocean, the deaths occurring. why doesn't that knowledge ever come out to the main stream public how it's affecting us now? how it's affecting global warming. >> anybody want to take that? it's a little more out out -- >> i'll talk about fukushima only in the context of the radio active release into the ocean. that's associated with it. if you really want some good concrete information very straight forward, evidence based information, go to our website and look at the center for marine and radioactive activity just published. we have a scientist who immediately when the tsunami hit and the meltdown in fukushima happened realized this was

probably the largest accidental release of radioactive -- into the ocean. we worked very hard and it wasn't through the government or anything we got funding to get into japanese waters and off japan waters to be tracing this and basically who came to the rescue for that funding was a private foundation, betty gordon moore foundation. one of the first things you have to do in scientific evidence and what's happening in some of these crises is get the baseline data. that enabled to get the baseline data and also establish relationships between japan and international scientists to pull together in a cooperative way to continue to trace what's happening with the fukushima ocean radioactivity. also these scientists have worked very hard in getting information out to the japanese public. there was a workshop and public forum. the japanese came in droves and

thanked the scientists for getting the unbiased, solid information out there. we worked very creatively through crowd sourcing to get, again, samples of water along the west coast and that has come in to be analyzed and shows that the level of threat is very, very low, well below a safety standard. we have a whole center devoted to it. >> i want to thank all of you for your interest this morning in this panel and please thank me in -- join me in thanking these distinguished scientists for their time. [applause] >> our coverage of this year's american renewable energy summit continues with american rivers

president bob irvin who says there's a fresh water crisis in the u.s. and around the world. >> i had the one drug foundation. before i get to introduce the work of peter and bob, i just wanted to tell you a little bit about what we do. we were created in 2007 by the founder and everybody is asking why would cirque du soleil pay so much attention to water that it would create a foundation? the first connection is evidently our founder, who started basically from nothing toured the world, started his career as a flame thrower, saw a lot of poverty worldwide, and wanted to have a major impact to alleviate poverty. he did a lot of research and soul searching to figure out where he would have the most impact and he realized quickly it was going to be through water. cirque du soleil also performs in countries all around the world where some of them have

serious water issues. obviously, our biggest permanent operations are in las vegas, right in the middle of the desert as well. so it's no coincidence i think that one drop was created. i also think that when we created one drop, basically cirque du soleil reinvented in the way of the circus arts and they thought there was room for perhaps a creative n.g.o. in a sector that would also inspire change rather than impose change. and i could talk to you and i will in a few minutes a little bit more about what we do. i thought i would show a little video that shows what we've done in the first six months of this year. it shows you a little bit about our business model and how we go on about our business. so cue the video. thank you. >> a partnership with water for

people and delivering a program in an integrated way. ♪

>> the united nations has laid important groundwork. i would want to also recognize water aid, the global poverty project. the one drop foundation and many more. ♪

[captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> there you see one drop is basically an organization that delivers very unique water management programs on three continents but more than just providing access to water and sanitation, i mean the greatest issue that our sector faces certainly is sustainability. there is anywhere between 30 and 75% of all the water and sanitation programs that are delivered worldwide that will fail within two years of being implemented. so quickly we wanted to come up

with a model to help overcome the sustainability challenge. not only do we provide access to water and sanitation but we also provide behavior change using the arts, culture, entertainments. that allows us to speak to communities from, people who are literate to illiterate the young and the old and address an entire community all at once. it is very similar to the work you are doing here. it will be an interesting connection to make later. the third component of what we deliver is the sea is a capital. we basically transformed water into revenue generating activities so after five or six years of implementation the community has enough resources and wealth and ownership of the infrastructure to maintain it forever.

now the reason why we're here today is certainly because it's hard to talk about water and or talk about energy without talking about water. decisions made in one sector definitely impact the other. they are intrinsically linked together. someone who actually saw, you know, and we talk, we've talked yesterday and we talked today and we will in the next few days talk about the energy crisis and the fact that in a little more than a hundred years we'll run out of oil, 200 years we're going to run out of gas. the fact is we're running out of water right now. i think someone who has seen it first hand because it happened in his back yard is peter mcbride who is an amazing award winning film maker

photographer, water expert. so, peter, we have about 30 minutes, a little less now to leave the audience with a powerful message about what's actually happening. do you want to share some of your thoughts? >> thanks. thanks for your work. thanks for coming out. just to give you a little background on what i do, i've worked -- i started as a photographer doing work mostly for "national geographic." i've had the privilege to travel over 70 countries. i started off doing adventures going to the far flung corners of the planet. after a little while i wanted to do a story a little closer to home. about five years ago i followed what i call my back yard river. i grew up here in the valley and the colorado river starts in the rocky mountains here and flows all the way to the sea of

cortez. it used to. it ran there for 6 million years. i followed that river about three times and was amazed four years ago when i came to the u.s.-mexican border just south of it and saw the colorado river go completely dry. that just perplexed me beyond my comprehension. colorado river ran to the sea for 6 million years.

not a single drop of it reached the sea since 1998. it's been drying up since the 1960's basically. i think what is so significant about that is that rivers really embody so much of fresh water as a whole. it supports us in recreation agriculture, industry, and basically maybe our well being. i started following rivers all over. i've now done about i think five source to sea rivers. i just completed a source to sea from 18,000 feet in the

himalaya and followed the sacred river the ganges all the way to the sea. the ganges river supports water for 400 million people in india. arguably one of the most contaminated rivers in the world. believed to be by 1 billion hindus sacred and embodyment of a god and goddess. what is so remarkable to me is

not only a river on the other side of the world that is loved and hugged daily by so many people, embraced, you know, face on and getting terribly over used and abused, revered and reviled as many like to say, yet at the same time, in my back yard, in a river that is famous in the world, worldwide for the grand canyon, so many of us turn our backs to it in part because we just think water is going to keep flowing. our taps are going to keep running. the reality is they're not. it's an issue everywhere. whether you're impoverished in india or whether you live in aspen, colorado, or anywhere in the southwest or even in the

u.s. because every bit of lettuce comes commercially from the u.s. and our grocery stores comes from colorado river water. winter lettuce. baby spinach in january comes from the colorado river. and lake mead, one of the largest reservoirs on the colorado river built by hoover dam, 1935, has now reached the all-time record low, 39% full. so we have this mentality that water is, you know, as long as our taps flow, no big deal. we'll just keep turning the sprinklers on and keep doing business as usual. and we're basically just eroding, detonating our reservoirs our bank account water. what amazes me is nobody is really paying that close attention. a lot of people banging the drum but it seems to be one of these issues that goes very heavily ignored and now wherever i go whether it's locally or abroad i'm seeing the issue everywhere. water, water, water. fresh water is just vanishing. what i was going to do is show you a two-minute little video i recently did because i want to make you aware that although we're in an extreme, i would call it approaching a very serious crisis on fresh water, particularly around rivers but ground water as well, it feels like what can we do? >> you have to go over that. >> this is an improvement, i swear. >> you're moving. >> this is called moving an inch an hour. >> a trickle of water is enough. trust me. >> what are we doing here? >> the last time i came here, i walked 90 miles across a dry forgotten river channel. my back yard river, the colorado. i've been chasing its flow for years. most people think of it as that loved architect of the grand canyon, carrying the memory of the rocky mountains near my home in colorado. be you it is different down here at the end. it's been sucked dry so we can eat baby spinach in january. but in the spring of 2014, something happened.

two countries decided to work together to restore a delta. the hands of many lifted the gates on the morales dam and released a temporary pulse of water. less than 1% of the river's flow. mexico's allocated aqua into the delta to see what would happen. a river of sand became wet once again. and a fiesta ignited down the stream. locals celebrated the return of the rio. the river party only lasted a few weeks, though. we did what any river loves

would do. we floated it. by canoe, paddle boards. and eventually by foot crossing the shallows. >> i believe this is the colorado. generally the real colorado has no water in it. but as you can see, it's a pretty nice river right now. >> it looks amazing. usually this part of the river is completely dry. it's sand. it has been many years like that. >> on may 7, after nine,

13-hour-long paddling days -- we crossed 90 miles of the delta and reached the sea. it was the first and only paddle board crossing of the new delta. and the first time the colorado river kissed the sea in nearly two decades. on many levels, it was a preposterous journey -- foolish, even wrong headed. >> i don't feel like i'm getting anywhere. >> the most absurd paddle board mission ever. also beautiful and symbolic. and with a relative trickle, we can bring a river back to life if we try. [ applause] >> i'll just say a couple words before we move on to bob and american rivers. there are many people who often ask me, i think it is very symbolic on the dilemma we're dealing with water and fresh

water as i recently did a radio interview here and they said well, so the river -- colorado river doesn't reach the sea anymore. who cares? big deal if the river dries up. and i went on to give my usual answer as well. the fresh water interface with salt water, creates habitat, helps support us, i go down the list. that usually goes right over people's heads. i felt like saying, listen. what happened at the river in your back yard dried up? i think that is part of the dilemma and bob can get on to this as we often see our watersheds in our, just immediate vicinity. we don't look downstream. and all of these systems are very heavily connected.

and so i think, you know, taking a paddle board mission across this delta many say it was crazy. why would you let water go down into mexico with california's record drought, etcetera. i think it is just very symbolic of what we can do. that water was less than 1% of the colorado river. it was mexico's water. it wasn't taken from anyone else. i think there is potentially enough water in our systems if we use it wisely and with that we'll move on to bob. >> for those of you who don't know bob irvin, he is the c.e.o. of the american rivers association. he's been 30 years in the environmental field. he's a wildlife lawyer by training. he's been three years at the helm of the american rivers association and previously

worked for wwf, several nature conservancy organizations, as well as the united states senate. >> thank you. it's a real pleasure to be here. this is a great event. it's especially nice to be sitting next to my friend pete mcbride. pete is truly one of the world's great film makers and photographers. he did a film for american rivers last year when we named the colorado river america's most endangered river. it's the film called "i am red." it's won numerous awards. if you haven't seen it i

encourage you to go to his webie -- his website and watch it or american rivers.org and watch it. it'll bring tears to your eyes. it is that powerful. american rivers is a national conservation river advocacy organization. we were actually founded in denver in 1973. i believe sally was there at the creation. she worked for the wilderness society where the meeting was held. i've done the math. she must have been about 12 years old the youngest employee of the wilderness society. but it's always nice to be back home in colorado. as i said, we named the colorado river the most endangered

river last year. this year we named thee tributaries of the colorado. the upper colorado, white river, and hilla river on our america's most endangered rivers list. this year we named the san joaquin in california as america's most endangered river. we did that not because of the drought. the drought is just a symptom of decades of mismanagement of a river that literally is running dry. so each year we try to focus attention on rivers under threat and rivers where things can be done now to actually bring them back. and we really are facing a crisis for rivers and for fresh water around the world and here in the united states. just last weekend, people in toledo, ohio were told for two

days they could not use water for any purpose. katy russo is one of our staff members who is based in toledo ohio. she and her family were directly affected by this. she has written a blog on our website. and you'll recall a few months ago charleston, west virginia had a similar water ban when there was a spill of toxic chemicals into the river. we have mistreated our rivers throughout our history and continue to do so in many ways. climate change is affecting this. in toledo the reason the ban

went into effect was because of a toxic bloom in lake erie. that results from polluted run-off from cities and from farms. and as we see more storms and intense storms we see more of that run off occurring and more events like this unless we take steps to address the problem of polluted run off, unless we take steps to address the problem of climate change. if we don't address climate change and our rivers, we're really missing the boat. no pun intended. because the fact is that our rivers are one of our best defenses against climate change. they provide critical linkage for wild lifey to move in response to a change in climate. so addressing our rivers restoring our rivers to their natural state, is critical. but we're doing all of this in a climate of political paralysis as you've heard a lot about today and yesterday as well. the fact is that even though we have a crisis for our rivers, a crisis for fresh water, we seem to lack the political will to do something about it. right now the u.s. environmental protection agency and the corps of engineers are working together to finalize a rule that will restore clean water act protection to virtually all waters of the united states

particularly head waters streams, and wetlands. this is something that is desperately needed. it is needed because we have to correct another bad supreme court ruling of a few years ago. we need to get this protection back. it is being opposed every step of the way by the oil and gas industry, by home builders, the farm bureau, by the politicians they've spent good money for. unless the american citizens stand up and comment on this rule tell the e.p.a. and the corps of engineers we support this and we want to see all waters protected, this rule will be in trouble. so that's critical as well. there are a lot of challenges ahead. i want to share a couple reasons for hope. pete's film is an eloquent reason for hope. what he said a few moments ago if we have enough sense these rivers, we can bring these rivers back without a tremendous

amount of effort in many cases. i've seen that as i travel around the country. just a couple weeks ago, i was in peterson, virginia on the appomattox river where my organization has worked with the fish and wildlife service and the virginia fish and game agency to take out a hundred-year-old dam on the appomattox river. as soon as the first breach was in that dam the small, insignificant breach that was allowing the water to flow over it, there were baby american eels literally ready to switch up that one trickle of water. if you want to see it go to american rivers facebook page, the video there. it's amazing. three years ago when i became president of american rivers i went out to the elwa river in washington state on the olympic

peninsula where we had been working with partners and with the federal agencies to take out two large dams on the elwa river and restore 70 miles of a 75 mile river for salmon habitat. this is a river that had been blocked for a hundred years for salmon to go upstream and spawn beyond that lower five miles. as i stood on top of the dam that day, before all the ceremonies commemorating the event took place and before the dam came out i looked down and i could see salmon literally bumping up against the concrete of the dam just waiting, waiting for us to have the sense and foresight to take that dam out. now there are salmon spawning where they haven't for a hundred years. they knew where to go even though it had been that long since their ancestors had been going there. these are the things that give me hope. it tells me no matter how much we damaged our rivers the river is still there. if we have the sense and foresight to restore it and take out

the dams and clean up the pollution, the river will come back with all of the life in it. when that happens, our lives come back as well. i am very, very hopeful though we have many challenges ahead. thank you. >> if i speak from experience, when one drop goes into developing countries and before we even begin implementing a program we need to have both the government and private sector, the social sector coming together to make this happen and work. i see people very much working private sector and so on. where do they convene? how do we bring these sectors together to collaborate? >> they convene on the river. we have a great slogan. it's "rivers connect us." it's true. they connect us in so many ways. for any of these things to happen all of these different interests have to come together. in rockingham, north carolina, this little community near the south carolina border, we worked there for over 10 years with first on a federal relicensing of a big hydroelectric dam. then we worked with the community to take out an old obsolete dam. then we worked with the community to create a new blue trail which is a paddle trail with a hundred acres of green way around it which has become an engine to revitalize this community that lost thousands of jobs when seven textile mills closed years ago. by working with the community, federal and state agencies, with partner groups in that area all of those interests have to come together to make that happen. i think it's the same in the u.s. as in the developing world, also. >> at one point the -- to give you an example of how challenging some of these working on river situations are, in addition to the colorado compact called the law of the river written in 1922, it is the first of its kind, the first binational agreement treaty to bring water back for the environment. there are 260 rivers in the world that cross international boundaries and this is the first

time countries have worked together to bring back something not just for industry and people but for the environment too. so it's, it can be an uphill slog but the fact that that happened in 2014 on the colorado river with our second decade of drought is i think very helpful -- very hopeful as a sign that if we want to recan restore a lot of these things. >> i think you are in a privileged role because you act as a channel basically to convey these voices through beautiful medium of the movie to the general population. how do you make sure you transform these movies and platforms into real agents of change and not just people going to see movies? >> i don't know. that's a good question. i just try to -- i'm not a scientist. i don't consider myself a water expert. i'm just a concerned citizen with a camera. so i try to partner with people like american rivers and others to get the word out. i think -- my personal opinion is we need to push the needle in the public and in order to do that we need social media, you know, sadly the attention span has gotten down to about a minute and a half these days but if that's the tool we have to use that's what we need to do. >> i'd like to make a commitment to you today. the reason one drop works the way we do, we don't do pure awareness programs or platforms but we strive to create fundraising platforms that generate that kind of movement

and awareness. and we crated one of them. it's called one night for one drop. it basically gets billions of impressions every year when we do that. i'd like to find a way to integrate your content and make sure that through all of our platforms and anything we have available we help propel that message through the beautiful movies that you've produced. i certainly will do that. >> thank you. an honor. >> it's amazing. thank you very much for your great work. i think we have one minute left. if there are any questions from the floor for our panelists, we have a few -- yes? >> just holler. we'll repeat it. >> we can hear you.

>> originally i heard about an old application of paddle wheels being located on rivers that had generated a small amount of electricity but they don't affect the rivers in any way. they take it out in a short period of time. there are also generating

facilities. aspen has been in a big fight over a hydroelectric plant that was defeated by a vote of 51.4% and it was sponsored by a fossil fuel billionaire named koch, who lived upstream. why the citizens of aspen would submit to -- because he spent literally millions of dollars to defeat this when it's in the best interests of aspen and the environment. but there are many facilities and i understand koch generation is legal and the grid has to accept it. is that correct? does the grid have to accept cogeneration? >> i believe they do. if i can address your point, first of all, there are many opportunities to use existing diversions to generate hydro

electricity which is of course part of the solution to climate change. and so my organization, american rivers, has worked very closely with the hydro power industry and with some people that would not normally be our allies on some legislation that passed congress this past year to actually encourage that kind of development because we see that as a good alternative to taking a wild and free flowing stream and building a new facility on it and damaging the stream in that way. as far as i think it's the capital creek project goes, i know there's been a lot of controversy here about it. american rivers was engaged in that issue through our staff based here in colorado to make sure that the process going through the federal energy regulatory commission was not circumvented. to make sure that the proper reviews took place. my understanding is that -- it was clearly more than just one person who was opposed to this project.

>> thank you. >> my point is there are plenty of ways to use the rivers that don't denigrate them at all. on the colombian river in washington where they built a series of dams, i think 30 years ago, they were looking forward to selling electricity to the western grid, but dams are being taken out as i understand it. is that right in the columbia river are they taking dams out? >> funny you should bring that

up because i cut my teeth as larbgworging on whoops litigation and it actually involved the construction of five nuclear plants in the columbia river basin. the dams were built during the depression in the 1930's. while they certainly have done an amazing job in bringing cheap and abundant electricity to the northwest and been a real engine for economic development there, they've also done tremendous damage to the salmon runs which are pretty important in that part of the world, too. so nobody is proposing taking out all of the dams but there certainly has been a lot of discussion about taking out the four lower snake river dams which is particularly damaging to salmon that go up into idaho. >> we're getting these messages. thank you very much to both of you. thank you for your questions. i think that we saw this from local issues to global issues, water certainly is top of the agenda. thank you very much. thank you. [ applause] >> another discussion from the american renewable energy summit focuses on the environmental impacts of large scale farming. from aspen, colorado this is half an hour. >> hi everybody. i'm -- actually we have decided to shift and not do a panel.

we don't have enough time in 30 minutes for discussions so i'll make a little bit of a presentation. let me see if i can get this here. yep. there we go. i'm going to give a bit of a presentation on how do we -- how can we transform our food system to one that can truly nourish 9 billion people by 2050 while mitigating and adapting to climate change and restoring the world's ecosystem. and that's going to be the focus of my presentation. and then these two folks that are here with me, we have kate mcbride, who has a local farm here. she is going to speak to us a little bit about the beneficial role of live stock in providing nutrition for local communities. and we also have brook le van here from sustainable settings to talk about some of the exciting things happening here on the farms. i'll start out with a presentation and then we'll shift. we would like to discuss with you all these issues a lot more especially this role of live stock in sustainability. i think we saw in that trailer