of climate catastrophe might be just a little bit narrow. that in fact taxi drivers are important to the conversation, but it's not the whole conversation. climate change is harder. strikes us as something more difficult to get a grasp on. think about the future and the rise of robots, we should also be thinking about the rise of the ocean. can'tl argue that you think about one without thinking about the other. to think about climate change without considering the future and theconomy

possibilities and importance of both. it can be daunting to consider , automation, and migrant population all at the same time, but this is what we will face in the 21st century. atasha and i began conversation, a thought experiment on -- she is a sociologist among many things and we started talking about what can we do and what is a good analogy for -- to think through these different issues of climate change, automation, and migrant populations. we began to think about the 1930's wearied we began to think about the crises, the multiple crises of the 1930's especially the dustbowl and the great depression. climate change today is not as visible as the dustbowl but we

still need to act and though words -- in the words of fdr, we must act, we must act quickly. what are the similarities? the 1930's experience this great depression in the dustbowl. naïvely if you think back to high school history, you will remember the dustbowl had a lot of dust. it was an ecological crisis am a ecological catastrophe and the great depression had something to do with money. they both had roots in the same thing, and the stock market speculation. in the urban market speculation, and the far mortgage speculation of the 1920's. they converged into an economic and ecological crisis stemming from this relationship with the land that was primarily financial in practice. the new deal had lots of ways to handle the economic. there is a long list of long words that you do not need to read, i promise you. for the ecological solutions, they planted kudzu.

their economic imagination was stronger, more vital, more creative than anything we did with the ecology. as we think through these issues we want to ask the deep questions, why have we forgotten so much about the economic solutions of the new deal which put our economy on a brand-new footing and wise it's much harder to imagine ecological solutions in tandem with the economy? one of the things we learned as we wrote this talk together is we disagreed. which we think is at the essence of how we need to approach these problems. we need collaborative disagreement which is also part

of the new deal. also part of policy solutions of the 1930's. we will frame our talk around these two issues of mitigation and adaptation. where adaptation is the idea that we need to adapt our political economy to climate change. we do not need to alter its underlying logic. in mitigation we need to fundamentally alter the relationship under which our capitalism operates. this was also in the new deal, personified by these two men, these two white men, these two white men with power in the 1930's so things are a little different now, hopefully. jesse jones on the top there is the guy hanging over the shoulders of the two other guys, the reconstruction finance corporation. he was a banker from texas. he was an investor, a publisher. he was a quintessential capitalist. he believes in the power of capital to alter the world around him in a way that texans believe the world can be remade according to their well as long as you find enough loans. and the secretary of the interior, a politician. he believed that capitalism itself had failed and we need to find a new way.

the high school history you remember is probably more about the dickey friday. civilian conservation corps, the building of beautiful national parks. this is from the jesse jones perspective. that is what the results were, whereas jones felt capitalism just needed a little love, needed a little help in the dynamic investment to the economy.

in his first inaugural address, roosevelt told the americans, "a plague of locusts sent by an angry god for the results of incompetence and stubbornness." what is nice about this is that since it is man made we can adapt to it. perhaps we can mitigate it to my perhaps we can engage with it through the very mechanisms through which we caused this crisis to occur or, hopefully, invent new solutions. but these conditions which roosevelt warned had come very close to destroying modern civilization are once again upon us. we hope to use this as an analogy to begin to think through how to talk about these two very scary, very important, very pressing issues that are facing us today. >> as we think about this analogy, we thought it would be helpful to review what happened to the dustbowl and how it came to enter the political conversations about what to do during the new deal.

so on may 9, 1934, a few wins started rolling in the north dakota's and within two days a huge wall of our earth miles 2000 wide barreled toward new york and washington. the cities on the eastern seaboard were completely eclipsed. the statue of liberty was not visible. the storm had dropped 350 million tons of topsoil as it moved across the country. but most importantly, the storm brought the dustbowl, the ecological disaster in america's heartland to washington and new york among the centers of power and finance. today, climate change is not always most felt in the centers of power and finance. as we go through this, we will bring up some of the analogies that might be helpful. the dustbowl and the storms that accompanied it was truly apocalyptic. the storms were catastrophic, the drought that afflicted the region was equally catastrophic.

reporters who visited the region wrote of dead crops, starving livestock, plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers and the new york times wrote "the cold hand of death has dissented on the bread basket of the nation. it has become a lost people living in a lost land." by the time this dust storm a , year after it hit, 850 million tons of topsoil had been lifted off the earth and transported around the country. the storms would continue for four more years. unlike today where climate change is something theoretical off in the future, this was truly catastrophic created felt like the end of days.

but the dustbowl was geographically separate from washington so here you can see , where the dustbowl was concentrated, in this southern heartland of the united states and policymakers filled it intermittently.

essentially, the dustbowl was the product of a speculative bubble. the government had begun parceling out the land in 1909 and people did not take them up on the offer right away. when wheat prices shot up to two dollars a bushel during world war i, when the turks blocked the shipment of wheat the u.s., and wheat prices shot up dramatically, people moved west. it was the new gold rush caused by these high wheat prices but it was also made possible by a series of financial structures that allowed for this massive and energetic movement of people to take advantage of it. easy credit for mortgages and tractors and also the notion it did not matter that this area had no rivers, the rain would follow the lal. plow.

if you disrupted the earth it would cause atmospheric imbalances which would cause the rain to fall so the movement was massive and people came who were speculative farmers, and the wheat prices started to fall. it did not fall dramatically at first, they fell a little bit from two dollars a bushel to half that. pretty germanic, but not catastrophic. -- pretty dramatic, but not catastrophic. they planted more wheat and shipped the wheat to the cities. in much the same way, we are also facing a situation where the financial structures that we have set up, the speculative structures we have set up may be affecting our planet in ways we have not yet fully understood. drought came to this region in

1930 and belied the claim that flatwould follow the flat plows. the price of wheat dropped dramatically. farmers left. people did not plant weight. when the winds started to blow as they did in 1933 33 million acres were vulnerable to the , wind. land lost5% of planes their topsoil, a loss equivalent to 7% decline in gdp or the land in oklahoma. the poor as they always are were hit the hardest. one third of farms faced foreclosure. the poor were getting sick on dust pneumonia. so much livestock was starving that the government launched programs to purchase starving

cattle. by 1930, the mid-1930's, a quarter of the families in the great plains relied on aid for their basic subsistence. this is not a surprise for they are always hit the hardest but the issue here that this example raises our weather the poor an indicator of when our social and economic systems are not working, are they an indication of broader system failure? the poor last 2.5 million people. those who were poorest and without resources. these are the famous pictures that dorothy lange took. they became our first climate change refugees in the u.s. so, these drought refugees as they were called at the time became a huge cultural phenomenon. think steinbeck much cultural , production around this but most people did not leave. most people moved within the dustbowl to places they had not been as much a roach and or two to cities but the total

decline was 5%. there is also a narrative about how everyone moved to california. this was the great migration of the okies to california. many did migrate to california but it turns out not that many , more than had migrated in the previous decade. but in 1930 and 1940, only 80,000 more people that had migrated in the previous decade migrated during the dust bowl. that is 8000 a year, not a huge amount but they migrated at a , time of economic crisis. they displaced people from soup lines and jobs and this is why , there was such strong reaction. our economic systems may be much more fragile in times of economic crisis than otherwise. the federal government came up with a series of ideas about how to deal with this.

most of them were national in scope, but the one they did come up with for dealing with ecological disaster in particular was very modest. to deal with this cataclysmic, disaster, there was much debate about whether this was necessary. hugh bennett became the leader of the conservation service and asked should we even bother? it turned out that day there was it dust storm that had flown in from the dustbowl and he said look outside your window. the rehabilitation of the land was very standard, not very imaginative. things like drainage, planting , saplings would die within a year, and grasses. and making the rehabilitation of soil contention on not receiving state aid. and this program was modestly

successful, at achieving its goal which was to make sure that people could stay where they were and continue to plant wheat. by exploiting the soil in a way that the soil could not handle. so fast-forward. it turns out that we are actually following that same trajectory. the dustbowl is an area where the technical engineering of agriculture has expanded and deepened through agribusiness. only growss not weed, but many other crops and does so by drawing on an underground aquifer called the ogallala aquifer. the prediction is within 50 additional years, we are likely not have any water at all.

the equivalent of lake mead is drawn up every year and in some places the water is already gone. it would take 6000 years to replenish this aquifer. more energy in the form of soil in fact fertilizer goes in then tahn comes out through food. there is a system through federal subsidies and the organizational agribusiness that supports this kind of agriculture. and as the aquifer declines, we are beginning to see some of the same kind of desperate intensification strategies that we saw by farmers during the bowl, trying to figure out how to draw up more water. but the dustbowl has reemerged as a dustbowl. the great plains has reemerged as a dustbowl. they have been hit by drought since 2012. many old-timers who lived to the first series of drought and storms claim that it looks just

like the beginnings of the dustbowl that they lived through. >> that is the story of intensification. what is the story of innovation in the new deal? what is the story of not just misallocation of capital, but proactive allocation of capital? the economic policies new deal did not directly address the dustbowl, but it helped the people who work set in motion the migrants, the displaced , begin to adapt to their new , lives. you see pictures of the so-called hoovervilles. these were the shantytowns. this one is flooded out in california. these were not unique. about 300,000 migrants came to california. that was not substantially more than would have come in the previous decade as well. but this issue of all these people like today was framed as an excess of people, an excess of labor.

there is too many people, not enough jobs but it was not just in the early 1930's the question of too many people or excess labor but a question of excess , capital. owny, if you look at our banks, how much capital is there above what is required by law? the answer is $2.3 trillion in excess of what is required to meet reserve requirements, two thirds of the federal budget. we will come back to this number in a little while. we should recognize that if there is $2.3 trillion just sitting in a bank, probably it is not being well used. that probably this capital ought to be invested somewhere else. and this right here is where capitalism failed. this is not a question of uber or robots but the failure of capital to be invested to

innovative new industries that provide millions of jobs. it was not just a problem today. it was also a problem in the great depression. you can look at this letter which is a letter between the head of citibank, then national city and the head of bank of america where they talked about how it was "impossible to find any use of money." they did not know where to invest their capital. the smartest bankers in the country were unable to find a place to invest their capital productively. the new deal was not just the story of harold hickey. it was also a moment of a reinvention of how capital could be stimulated to move through the economy, to restart the economy. how do you get the private capital and i'm now making the film guys nervous -- how do you get the private capital that's over here onto the gardens to

foster recovery. this is an image from the 1930s. i want you to notice how nervous uncle sam looked. how uncle sam is in fact standing on the hose, but only nozzle.m has the and this is just a basic question of the 1930s. how do you get private capital back in circulation so that there is a widespread recovery? the way they did it then, and we wonkish in on the q&a if you want, but basically, how this private capital at bank of america, city bank and other insurance companies that filter through market making mechanisms, like the housing administration, which provide houses, the r.e.a. which provided electricity to all rural america and the defense corporation which we'll come back to in a second. what's interesting about this is that what's the one single

silver bullet? there's a multiplicity of approaches for capital banks, finance companies, local electricity cooperatives and capital went to business. and featherest, you can see a variety of sectors of the economy that received stimulation. so aerospace, what i'll talk about now, one of many different areas through which this idle capital put in motion again through the activities of men and women like jesse jones. why are we talking about this? why are we talking about this? how do you get someone to invest in something that seems impossible? in retrospect, the aerospace industry seems like an obvious thing to put money into. of course, it's really bad for oil consumption but it's really , great to get around. of course, how do you do this? how do you get money into something that seems cutting edge and impossible. green energy. the 1930s, airplanes seemed an oddity and the impression seems

closer lindberg's famous flight the atlantic bambi the x prize seems to us today. than the x prize seems us. lindberg flew the atlantic in 1927, so you should think about the relationship between the new deal and the aerospace industry like we think about space planes today. maybe in silicon valley, they're like oh, yeah, that's fine. everyone else, that's crazy. nobody thinks they're going to ride a space plane anywhere, ever. this is how aerospace was conceived. to put it in perspective, in 1939 -- you might think aerospace was big in the 1930's like indiana jones. he rode in the planes. it was more like a garage industry. more americans in 1939 worked in candy manufacturing than worked in aerospace. so how do you do this? how do you go from something less important than candy to being the main driver of the entire economy in about five years? the answer, it was done to the defense plant corporation. defense plant corporation using

but really iton of war was about allocating , capital, take all this money from the banks and insurance companies and put it into the aerospace industry. in just the course of a few years, the aircraft capacity had expanded by 4,000%. by the end of the war, it was four times larger than the prewar -- the largest industry in the prewar, which was the car industry. it also transformed the manufacturing that's happening. so it's prewar manufacturing centers for new york city and detroit, during the war, manufacturing moved into exactly those regions like fort worth, kansas city, tulsa, omaha, they that were hardest hit by the dust bowl. it was in those places at that new factories were built and new jobs were created. so what does this mean? it means that this is a mechanism by which entirely new innovative cutting edge crazy

technologies can provide jobs to millions of people throughout the country. by the end of the war, 40% of the los angeles workforce, about 2.1 million people, ended up working for airplane companies. where did the okies go to work? they went to go work for curtis wright. this was made possible by capital, capital that was not being provided by private means , but was instead filtered through the defense plant corporation. these are different companies, all well known companies now. you can see the varieties of different amounts of financing that came through the defense plant corporation, which was a part of the reconstruction finance corporation. now, we talk about aerospace. let's talk about aluminum. aluminum today is considered a commodity, a really cheap commodity, something so cheap we can line our streets with it. yet in the late 19th century, it was more expensive than gold.

and part of what the dpc did was transform the aluminum industry into expensive, hard to get metal, into something so cheap we use it every day in all of our products. and we think about how to move from expensive dirty dangerous oil towards green energy, this is the model we should be considering. do we have the money for it though? it seems like that would cost a lot. if you convert all the money from this exact moment the , reconstruction from the dpc, you add up everything it provided from the aerospace industry to aluminum industry to synthetic rubber, all these other things, it's $95 billion. that sounds like a lot of money until you compare it with the $2.3 trillion that is sitting right there in the banks right now. this is an example of how you could to these changes, adapt to the models in the past and create innovative ways of investing capital to the climate change challenge of today, to

the challenge of the future of work today where jobs and tasks , are being replaced because it is easy to replace them with technologies we have. humans are best suited for jobs that don't exist yet. portfoliohad a mindset. he knew that some things will fail and other things would succeed. instead of having a consistent ideology about where to put money when and hoping that one particular thing would work out, you have to unleash a variety of different approaches and this is , something we need to do as we forward trying to handle climate change. lynn: now, we just want to fast forward to the present and look at climate change as it's manifesting today. we won't go into a whole prognosis of what's going to happen. our scope and would take many days.

what we want to flag here is if you just take one prediction, the sea level rise, and you mask map that onto economic change and economic production, it turns out the rays alarm cause us to think about exploring adaptation. these are the areas of the u.s. that are very vulnerable to sea level rise and to the extreme climactic events that accompany that major storms, storm surges, , flooding, sea water intruding, etc. and so forth. these are the areas of our country where the economy is most productive. you'll notice that there's a that they map perfectly on one correlation here that they map perfectly on one another. , this is the place where we're betting on our future. this is where venture capital is invested. this is where we see our future emerging. if you'll notice, there seems to be an overlap. unlike during the dust bowl, in some way, the catastrophic very painful cataclysmic climate

event that happened, the ecological disaster that happened in the the dust bowl with the climate event of the drought was a godsend. it moved labor from small-scale agriculture to the industries that needed them. and so this act of god, protected the federal government from having to do it basically by force or through other policy means. it was fortuitous. but if you look at where our future lies or at least where we think it lies, any kind of climactic event that affects those areas is not likely to have the same kind of effect. y effect.ia if we just look at two centers that we think of as places of innovation, financial innovation, technological

innovation, we can see that centers with a one-meter rise are likely to be highly affected. the thing to note here, this one-meter rise, the projection for when it is likely to occur moves closer and closer as each scientific study emerges. a year ago, we thought this would happen in a century. now, we are worried that it may happen within 30 to 40 years, the life of a mortgage. if you are in new york, you say might think that does not look terrible no more people from new , jersey, they can't cross the bridge, maybe that's not so bad. [laughter] >> but if you are google, you should be asking yourself why you're building your headquarters where in 30 years, it will be flooded. if you're facebook, you should be asking yourself why you are investing in locating your offices here. we are likely to be fine.

we are all fine. [laughter] louis: so what does this mean? what does this mean thinking about the new deal, thinking about the 1930's? these are analogies. these are not a play book. they are experiences, warnings, beginning of a conversation and encouragement to help us think about the future, to help us think about what has worked and what hasn't worked, but doesn't define the entire space of what we can do or what we definitely shouldn't do. we know we should avoid doing more of the same, that investment is easier than abolition of wheat farming, for instance, and we know that the poorest will be hit hardest, especially those in the u.s. and abroad. you at the same time know where it's been successful, the collaborative disagreement, multiplicity, inconsistent experiments, and the portfolio mind-set have enabled us to think through and succeed in solving some of the most crushing economic challenges of the day. the world is not the same as it

was. there are new things in the 21st century. the biggest advantage we have, of course, is that, one, we know what's coming. we know this is going to happen. we know that climate change is now inevitable. and two, we have the lessons of the past to help steer us through these shoals. between the two of us, we have a slight disagreement. we agree in our values and we agree on what's going to happen, but how to respond to this? and this is not something to be avoided. this is something to be acknowledged, encouraged and fostered, because it's only through this collaborative disagreement that we can really get through this crisis. these crises. i for instance think it's very important to creatively finance new technology, new work practices that will help us mitigate climate change. i think we can remake capitalism to be greener, to be more profitable, and more ethical. i think that we can move from oil to artificial photo synthesis. i think we can move from

consolidated centralized work places to distributed work places. and i think this because i know that it has happened before. i think that to be practical we confine our solution space within the rule set of capitalism. but at the same time, i think that rule set of capitalism can be widely altered. i think back to the 19th century where we radically reconfigured , capitalism towards more more moral and profitable ends. i'm thinking slavery. in the late 19th century about half our gdp was related to the production of, consumption of or the distribution of slaves and slave related commodities, including the mortgaging of enslaved people. did we end slavery? we did. did it destroy capitalism? no. in fact, it did the opposite. we took something half of our economy and reoriented towards a new kind of capitalism that was more profitable, more innovative than anything that had happened before.

this is how we should be reframing our thinking about the challenges to our economy. this isn't about cost. this is about opportunity. natasha: so in thinking about climate change there's a lot of , discussion about technological innovation and opportunity, and while i think this kind of adaptation is important and necessary, i don't think it's sufficient. google cars have become kind of an avattar for the future. they're very exciting. they're self-driving. but actually what will matter more for climate change is a fundamental rethinking of how we move through space. google cars use the same highways, the same infrastructure, and the same concept about moving through space. what we may need to start thinking about are things like zoning, redesigning our transport systems, rethinking our relationship to space and

how we move through it and, in fact, since i'm picking on google here a little bit but , google is actually thinking about that a lot through their faubt out alphabet outfit. they have a lab called sidewalk lab. the trouble with zoning is it's not sexy. why is zoning not sexy? we have certain ideas about where the fields of possible action are during the new deal. they were very heavily focused on finance and agriculture -- well, less so on agriculture as we've shown and another way of thinking about these are institutions and land use. so institutions are essentially how we interact with each other, how we deal with each other and land use is how we deal with the land, how we use the land for our productive purposes. but as we conceptualize these, we always view the earth as unchanging. it is a constant. it is a background. it does not change unless we change it by plowing up the earth and hoping that the rain will follow or today's analogy

seeding the clouds to hope that the rain will fall on california. ponding though becomes very sexy zoning though becomes very sexy if you imagine the earth constantly changing under your feet. if you imagine that we understand to be stable is no longer so, that these are new problems, new challenges, and we have to build new systems of flexibility. and thinking about planning in that way forces us to rethink how we might think about how we interact with each other through institutions, if we were worried about the earth changing in unpredictable unknowable ways and how we interact with the earth if it is also changing and evolving in unpredictable and often very, very fast ways. the trouble is -- and the big challenge for making fundamental change is that the people who worry about climate change don't talk to the people who worry about changing production systems and the future of work.

in both spheres, there's an understanding that we're at an inflection point, that things going forward are likely to look very different from the way they have looked in the past. but these discussions have remained separate and our intention at this talk was to bring them together. what we'd like to see -- which i think is extremely important -- is that climate scientists help inform discussion about how will it be affected by climate change. how well our transport routes ed? affect di how will our supply routes change? how will manufacturing change. how will you build the planes? and what we'd like to have is people who worry about changing production systems have conversations with climate scientists so they can

productively think about how to adapt and mitigate even as they produce. and bringing these areas together raises a whole series of new unasked questions and experiments, some of which may seem kind of fantastical, like how do we move silicon valley? it's not a trivial question. if silicon valley gets flooded, how do we move the network, the capital, the knowledge economy that has been so imbedded and that we have been unable to replicate even though cities and countries around the world have tried to replicate it. how do we move it when it is flooded. that is 30 years down the road. and the whole series of questions and some of these questions are questions that we are asking here through the future of work and workers projects, and we are worried about how do we treat each other as the climate and the economy change, what is the new moral economy for our changing world? ok. so louis and i highlighted our differences, and actually it may be just a difference in focus or approach. if you're worried about adaptation, it seems that the solutions may be easier to come by.

there is data that there are clear price signals, and there are institutional pathways and historic examples of reform that make it seem possible and doable, and lessons that we can draw on. if you're worried about mitigation, it's a whole different ball game because we don't understand the systems that are changing. our understanding of them is profoundly incomplete, changes by the day. and so we have to ask in a setting that is highly incohate, and yet, we have to act now, or our actions are likely to have no effect at all and we have to , ask in ways that are profound, in ways that would actually look like the revolution in the institutional structures that we rely on, the revolution and our relationship to land. here, i'm not using revolution in a bernie kind of way.

what i'm saying is that we need to reconceptualize our notion that the earth and the resources that it generates are here for our productive uses only. although these are different approaches, we think that they offer possibilities, and here i will just mention the possibilities. do you want to say anything about this? louis: no, i think the important thing is we have to act and act quickly and in multiple ways and realize that the future will not be stable. the future will be a rewriting of the world in a constantly changing way. and as we move forward, the future of work must help us address these issues. the conversations we have have ife to be brought together we're going to mitigate and adapt, we're going to survive as a species and as a planet. we hope it's the starting point for beginning to think through

what are the policies we can do to invent industries of the future, to invent a way of handling this ongoing and almost inevitable change. natasha: and to face the and to face the unknowable. thank you so much for coming in tonight. [applause] >> sorry. >> we went longer than we were .upposed to will we have time for q&a? host: we'll have about 15 minute for q&a. louis: all the questions and all the answers, we'll solve it all in 15 minutes. i think you're in the middle, right. host: yes, i'm in the middle and i have the microphone for the front of the room, ok. so that was a fantastic talk, and it was very -- the work and workers group has been feeling these issues but this brought to

a whole new aspect to it, even though we've talked about climate change and environmental problems that could enhance both the kinds of economic complexities that we face, but also what the future of work and workers will be. we hadn't really laid out that agenda quite so clearly as the two of you did tonight and i'm very grateful for that because it really helps us and i think everybody in the room was part of our group and hopefully others of you will see this as a way in which we might begin to think as we go forward. are there some questions? i'm sure there are comments you want to raise. christy, you send the first one. will you introduce yourself? audience: hi, thank you. i'm martha russell, media access at stanford university. i love the talk, bringing disciplines together in this way is so exciting. and i do have this question though. you talked about a lot of things that we know and it's important

to, you know, put those stakes in the ground but looking at the , future that you paint, what would you say are the most important things that we need to know that we don't now know that would help us create this future that we want to live in? host: i was going to collect a couple of questions but that one is too hard to pass up. i think you have to take it right away. natasha: well, i think the challenge is that we don't really know what we need to know. this is like an impossible problem. it's a wicked problem. we do know that things that we have considered stable are no longer such and that they are likely to present us with challenges that are unpredictable and unlike anything we've ever seen. so just to give you an example, basically much of our economy relies on shipping containers, moving products around the world, and one can imagine that storms, major climactic storm events would make that , difficult.

so one piece of data we came across is that for a cup of coffee, that's 30,000 miles of transport. i think the answer to that question is what are our sensitivities? what are the places where we are most vulnerable as an economic system? we can't predict what the climate will do. we're trying very hard, but we're not there yet. where is our economic system most vulnerable, and who is most vulnerable? and where will we see the vulnerabilities emerge? who will be the canary in the coal mine? what will be the canary in the coal mine? i think when we do our financial models we'll often like to run regressions and hold everything else constant. i like numbers too. numbers are very reassuring and numbers may or may not have anything to do with where we're going.

wild discontinuities for the good and the bad. that's the essential truth about capitalism, that it's a discontinuity, with all of human history. it's only been around a few hundred years, has produced unimaginable amounts of wealth and unimaginable amounts of inequality. so what do we think about is how do we turn an engine into working for us rather than working us or and thinking about this in relation to climate change, you have to think about it simultaneously. you can't just hold everything else constant. host: there was a question. audience: my name is edward strickland. i'm a ceo of a business named gbiz incorporated and we're a member of the stanford center professional development. in regards to the timing of the change, there's some systemic issues that are occurring today that didn't happen in the early 1900s, and that's the population growth. it is tenfold. and the demand on the industrialized capitalized model is that much greater now than it ever has been before, and the problems that we're facing today from that in regards to land

grabs throughout the world, for the oceans, the food, the land sustainable to be used is even more great than it ever has been. how do we calculate the change? because if you say there's an inflection point that needs to make this change occur, it cannot be gradual. it has to be bifurcated and there has to be some radical revolution. otherwise, we won't change. can that be addressed? host: thank you. i did get them to not include demography as well and this already complicated -- natasha: we were supposed to have a half hour. as you can see, we were held to that. host: but that's a very important point. louis: do you want to collect questions? host: yeah, why don't we collect a couple of questions. audience: i'm mark, chief technology of a tech company here, netapp. it strikes me that there is one

difference here. maybe there isn't because i don't know the history. but we're in a situation where there's a lot of prediction of climate change and there are many people who don't believe the predictions. but photographs you showed from the 1930s, that's not a prediction. there's a wall of dirt coming across the country. and i don't know whether there was a precursor to that prediction of disaster that was ignored, bid in all our case there's a politically different related toand it is the earlier question you almost , need to have an actual cataclysmic event, it appears, as we did in the to bring people 1930's to action. it's wonderful to think about this, i think, and this audience will get lots of people sympathetic, but to move the population, how do we bring that about rather than saying in five years, "we told you so." host: one more question, in the back? i'll come to you next, i promise. audience: thanks. my name is randy spock. i'm a student at the business school down the road and i can't

speak on behalf of my fellow future cap less cronies but i , personally am very receptive to the arguments for adaptation and mitigation. my question is, how can we help? how can those of us who aren't scrutinizing these institutions from without but hope to be imbedded in them from within, how can we contribute to this ongoing process? host: so we've got three questions. one has to do with the importance of population shifts. the second has to do with how do we get the public to understand what's going on. and the third comes from the next generation, how can we help? louis: well, i'll try to pull a couple of things together here. i think some people already know this is happening, especially people who live in coastal areas, especially in the developing world. climate change is already real. climate change is not as real to us, but in many parts of the world it already is and there's emerging economies where if you look to studies, we're counting on for the continued growth of

capitalism, global capitalism in the 21st century. if you look to how we value all our stocks, it is through these are emerging markets. yet these emerging markets are the ones most vulnerable to new kinds of developments. one of the challenges is how do we think about this not just in the national context but a global context, where we come up against very real governance issues. and we'll have to think through how to deal with that. what can be done? i mean, if the answer is that these governance issues are such a barrier, how do we mitigate those governance issues in a libertarian way, or how do we move together and bring together different constituencies in a more status way? i think that it would be lovely if capitalists of the future could figure out how to make money off of saving the world. that would be the ideal situation. but i suspect that people who have these ideas don't have the capital to get going, and that

we through a series of policies have choked off access to innovators and small businesses that need that capital. it's hard if you're outside of very sexy short-term profits to get long term investments like we did in the 1930s to get these new kinds of industries going. natasha: so i think louis is actually right on the money with this. louis: we usually agree, by the way. we are drawing on artificial contrast. natasha: i think i would place the emphasis slightly differently, which is that the rigidity in terms of how we value successful investments, in many ways, we transplant those onto emerging economies. those rigidities are mirrored by policy rigidities. if we were going to think about what to do, one easy prescription would be, do no harm. so, for example, in many of our trade agreements, we have stipulations that make it incredibly difficult for local

and national governments to adjust and to respond quickly and effectively to climate change pressure. we may want to think about that as we draft trade agreements and maybe not include those stipulations, not only to allow countries to respond, but also because that knowledge of how to respond will provide us with guidance of how to move forward. the question about, did people know that the dust bowl was going to happen? some people did. and the trouble is that the people who did were not the people whose knowledge was valued. so there's a politics of knowledge even then, right. so the native americans who were displaced from the great plains were famously expert in managing these huge bison herds and got and got their livelihood from , it, and warned even as they

were chased off the land and as the last bison was killed, that this would destroy the earth. cattle ranchers who came in after them, gave the same warning, but they were not included in the speculative financial bubble that drove so many small farmers to the midwest. and finally, the question about population. pretty much everywhere you look in the world, we're on the other side of the population bubble. we're on the other side of the population hump. by that i mean our populations pretty much everywhere in the world are going to start declining. the challenge, the bigger challenge -- and we know how to manage that. the bigger challenge is that we don't know how to manage the movement of population. so in theory, for example, it's just a warm-up. the syrian conflict was the product initially of a drought that caused people to move cities, that lit the match on a political conflict and now we have these large refugee movements, but they're actually much like in the dust bowl,

subjectively not that large. we just don't have the political and policy capacity to deal with them. so the question is, how do we develop that capacity? because this will be a structural issue, and we will need to think about how to organize our production systems to accommodate the structural flow of people who have less a left in a rapid, not gradual, not planned way. host: i just want to add one thing to where the canary and the mine is and reinforce the point that often indigenous people have been moved to the absolute margins of viable land and water resources and are a very good way to know what's happening. they know when everything is disappearing. louis: i also want to say there's never excess people. there's insufficient opportunities. people are amazing, and people

are more creative than they are given credit for and we need to figure out ways to harness that and not people into roles where they can't be creative and be human. and part of the task of addressing these issues is really capturing the global creativity of the human race. host: i promised bob kaplan, who's not my husband, the next question though. was that you? no. introduce yourself. audience: i'm mike conrad. the last 10 years, chief economist for a small boutique. i think you've underestimated this analysis. although i love the integration of two very different fields so well and including some divisive discussion about technology, solutions or revolutionary solutions. i think we're headed towards revolution, personally because i don't see it will evolve. the problems i see, particularly the financial ones and the political ones, which are

closely intertwined with our bought and paid for government which means we'll likely have political revolution which will precede the biological and economical revolution which i consider happening fairly soon. my question is, how do you see that fourth third, i'm not sure, additional introductions because i consider both politics and economics very vulnerable in our country to revolution in the future, and i i certainly wouldn't use the name "mitigation" for that. i'd say revolution is its own name and maybe a third form for your stool. host: thank you, bud. louis: as a guy who spends his days reading, i prefer it not to be a revolution. yeah, i think one of the reasons that the new deal policies were so expensive though, but there that there was this genuine fear of the organization of people in revolt. the russian revolution was what, a decade and-a-half earlier. it was still very real.

i think maybe when this crisis comes together, we'll finally be able to push the political economy in a new way like we have in the past to be more equitable to produce -- natasha: this is where we disagree, right. because if we don't act now, we are done for. so any kind of natural resource that we're thinking about managing, any kind of hope for really survival on this earth, unless we actively engage with the processes of thinking about developing a new productive relationship to the earth at a time when the earth will no longer be constant. if you just take water, for example. we think about our water resources as being pretty stable but they're not. ,and they are stressing our productive systems and our political systems in ways that are extreme. so california has had a mild expression of this. but other parts of the world have had much more extreme expressions of this and have seen significant political unrest as a result. and yet we don't tend to worry

about it as being immediate. but when the crisis is here, the game is over. and as one colleague said in a talk he gave here, extinction is permanent. [laughter] host: we have time for just one or two more questions. so we'll take yours and glen's. audience: as a historian, i know you think in long cycles but the , rest of us aren't good at that. we think about what's for lunch tomorrow and concerned about next week. in fact, we know we apply huge discounts to the future and it , may be even worse for our policy makers, members of the house, we who are very concerned about what's happening now and not concerned about what's happening two years from now. how do you take that into consideration? host: introduce yourself.

audience: i'm glen. i teach at brown university. my question is we have an historian on capitalism and a student on migration. could you comment on where we see people moving on the planet and moving toward, not away from capitalism? audience: hi, i'm the ceo of a software infrastructure company and distributing company so i , was very interested in how our future will go. that's why i'm here. the three things you talked about that freed a lot of unused capital. one, you talked about slavery. the second you talked about was world war ii and aerospace. about the space program being fueled by the cold

war. so what i was wondering about is has there been an example where there's been tremendous capital infusions of that size that did not involve war, and then does second, that predict anything for you about how capital will move in the future of that scale? louis: thank you. i'll answer in reverse order. so one of the base we had -- i think it's an excellent question. i advocated that we frame this as war, war against the planet, that the planet wants to kill us, and we should frame it as war because people seem it like war, for whatever reason. rather than we are defending the earth, we are attacking the earth. i think this is a way in which we need to think about how we frame this problem so that the enemy is upon us, right. i was thinking about how america got whipped into this war time frenzy in world war 1 against the huns. germany had no interest in

germansg -- this was before they were nazis. they were just germans. it was a fear of imperial powers. this is one of the questions we this is an important question. were there places where it wasn't wartime in history. you think of factories in the 19th century, the textile factories were at war with in some places. you think about railroads, that was about the wars against indians. these are things that are partially about war but partially about other issues. nice if wewould be could invest in things that were not about war so we could have nasa without having to think about how to fight the russians

at the same time. there's a larger conversation we should have about how to get people motivated without trying to kill people. capitalism is where the job is. how do we create capitalism that can absorb obese people and remember it's only a little over a century old. how do we absorb all the migrations of people around the world and make capitalism more inclusive. ? perhaps than my colleagues -- i am less alarmist than my colleagues. we've seen all kinds of inequities before and they been rebalanced. 1877 in the railroad and how strikesre widespread against the inequities of capitalism that led to parts of ends when you being reconquered by gatling guns on the back of railroad cars. is that a possibility?

i hope not. is, is thistions time different? is this second machine age going to not be able to absorb all these people? shift, is itmatic more like an ice age than just a slight change, and how do we adapt to this question? >> this is a different scale than we're likely to see. we can look at the mayans or mesopotamia or the collapse of other civilizations that have not managed there resources well. the poor suffered most and were

hit first and hit hardest. be ally do think this may paradigm shift in terms of understanding and all those historical moments that we take constant, it's the ground beneath our feet literally shifting. i think it's great as someone ,ho worries about economies with the exception of one or two economists, basically there is a consensus that migration is helpful for economic growth. the trouble is not the people. he for a mention that, i would just say that they are a barometer just like we are arguing the poor or the rollerball, maybe. the fact that more mexicans are leaving then are arriving to

tell us something about the future that middle class and hold.middle class workers the prospects are not good in there's no point in coming or going. the trouble is the strain they put on the institutions that we have. our institutions are not massive to deal with influx of people. in the past they have been more flexible and they have grown in the u.s. and around the world, increasingly more rigid. i don't think it's accidental that we are also engaged in a system of labor arbitrage through our global supply chain, in ways that are much more evasive and systemic than they may have been before. war, lewis'sut campaign makes me deeply nervous and unsettled. that experiment makes me deeply uneasy.

it requires us to draw on the that have created the damage to solve the problem. that paradigm is us against the earth. what i'm suggesting is we need a paradigm shift and the production of institution and practices that embodied that shift. how do we think about ourcturing our government, international agreements, international trade and finance in ways that embody and ease of -- an ethos around working with this changing and stressed earth . and what does it mean for the future of work? lovely,ee that would be but i guess i'm just a little more pessimistic about the

possibility for that kind of institutional change. what i'm trying to ink through is what the most powerful levers we have to create this new change. i think we both agree it would be lovely to do something else. if you have ideas about it do this, i'm just deeply afraid we won't be able to do that. more and capitalism seems like something people like. >> in california, there are lots of debates about water rationing , there's no way we can ration water. and then there is a massive drought and then water is rationed because you cannot invent water. constraints, we may not want to deal with them until they are upon us, but then we are stuck. better to have more options than fewer when we are stuck. >> am going to thank both of our speakers for that fabulous

presentation of very disturbing material. i want to thank all of you for coming. a few. -- thank you. [applause] good job. >> more about climate change coming up in about five minutes here on c-span when we talk with

former republican congressman bob inglis about how the gop views the issue. the state department confirming a 400 million dollars cash payment to iran was contingent on the release of american prisoners. spokesman john kirby was responding to questions about a wall street journal story reporting that the u.s. would not let iran take control of the money which the country was owed as part of a settlement until a plane carrying the american prisoners had left iran. from two weekse ago in president obama and other officials denied the payment was contingent on the prisoner release. here is part of the state department briefing now. >> one assumes you're familiar with the latest wall street journal report concerning the payment of the $400 million to iran. is there anything in the wall street journal story that you dispute on factual grounds?

as much as i'm sure you'd --e for me to pick apart what i would like to do is respond to it. i have seen the article. let me address this whole issue of timing this way. complete -- to conclude multiple strands of diplomacy within a 24-hour period. go back and look at your own work that was done and you will see that we're completely above board about this. the president himself talked about the timing. able to conclude multiple strands of diplomacy within that 24 hours, including importation of the nuclear deal, and the settlement of an outstanding hague tribunal claim which saved american taxpayers potentially billions of dollars. as we set the time to deliberately levers that moment to finalize these outstanding

issues nearly simultaneously. it was already publicly known that we return to i and -- to iran is $400 million as part of the hague settlement agreement. the concerns that iran may renege on the risen or release given a necessary delays regarding persons at cannot be located as well as mutual mistrust between iran and the united states. we of course ought to maintain maximum leverage until after american citizens were released. that was our top priority. >> all return to my question. is there anything in the wall street journal story that you dispute on factual grounds? >> i'll have the article in front of me so not going to go through line by line. heif there was something left out that is untrue you would be in a position to tell us, wouldn't you?

>> essential finding of the story was that the payment of the $400 million was not done until after the prisoners were released. i am not disputing that. >> fire you not able to tell us that 10 days ago when i myself asked the question, can you at least ensure that those prisoners were in the process of being released? >> we were not in a position in and had no intention of getting into a tick-tock for every movement that happen within that 24 hour period. that was how we answer to question at the time. you are asking me about a press story that has already been written about it that has more detail about it, so i'm providing context. now you're saying it is used as leverage to connect to.

>> they were independent elements. >> but you were using one as leverage as part of the other one. >> i think it makes perfect sense that when we are in this -- if your top priority is to get your americans out and your are having some issues about locating some of them, thatyou want to make sure beforelease gets done you complete that transaction. they are connected in the sense that they came together at the and we obviously were making a priority of getting the americans out. frankly i think if we had done it any differently, then i think you and i and james and i would be having a much different conversation appear. may test the payment was contingent on their release, right?

>> what i'm saying is that because we had concerns that iran may renege on the prisoner release, we were already regarding some persons in iran as well as mutual mistrust, we of course, naturally, and should ,e held to task if we didn't sought to retain maximum leverage until after the americans were released. that was our top priority. but how is withholding the cash give you the kind of leverage you were seeking? >> we felt that it would be thatdent not to consider some leverage in trying to make sure that our americans got out. >> so if it had leverage on the release of the americans, then there is a direct connection between the two events, you are now telling us, right? the eventsng that can together simultaneously. obviously when you're inside of that 24 hours and you already have concerns about the in game in terms of getting americans out, it would have been foolish,

improvement, and irresponsible for us not to try to maintain maximum leverage. are asking me what their connection in that regard in the endgame, i'm not going to deny that. let's get away from the word leverage, which in basic english, you are saying that you wouldn't give them the $400 million in cash until the visitors were released, correct? >> that is correct. >> that from the state department reaching today in response to those comments, republican senator mark kirk of illinois to eating this. -- tweeting this. more on this story later today. next, our conversation on climate change continues with a focus on how republicans view the issue. >> we are back. joining us is former congressman

is. ingl thank you for being here. you were also the executive republicen.org. where people believe there's a solution to climate change so we are solving the problem of climate change so what we do is go around trying to convince conservatives to overcome our inferiorty complex we apparently think we are no goods at climate change but we have the answer. free enterprise. host: let's back up. how did you come to this position? have you always believed there as climate change? i st: in our first six years

thought climate change was hooy and all i knew was al gore was for it so i was against it. i was running again for congress in 2004 and my son said dad, i'll vote for you, he was voting for the first time and he said but you're going to clean up our act on the environment. this was the first of three and second set he went into the science committee. and third step really something of a spiritual awakening. on another science trip aussie and after we ists had a chance to talk he told me about conservation changes he made in his life in order love god and love people and i said i want to be like himso i introduce to do so cut wages and raise carbon act of 2009. probably not the greatest

decision in the middle of the -- so i got booted out of congress in 2010 and started republic en.org. host: and by someone our viewers recognize tray gowdy who heads up the benghazi committee. you lost to him in the primary. do you think you lost because of this you? guest: in the midst of the great recession it was important to have orthodoxy. when a tribe the under pressure it insists on orthodoxy and i voted for tarp which can never be forgiven by the tea party. i was for conference immigration reform even though we didn't call it that, and i voted against the troop surge in iraq, because i had conservative concerns about george bush who is my friend but just saying the climate

change is real even though i voted against cap and trade i thought that was poor solution for climate change and proposed an alterrauntive which we believe is an -- host: you call it climate en. what are you proposing to do? guest: essential to put all the cost in all the fuels and eliminate all the subsidies so there's a transparent marketplace. probably the best means to do that is an upstream of a revolutionary carbon tax. pay attention to those last two words, is that right carbon tax. that's word, is that right but those first two. revenue neutral. that means we cut taxes somewhere else in equal amounts so athletes no growth in government and then flied imports taxed in the same way

our goods are tax do so and you put it together where it's adjustable al and the phil donahue show in the 1970's, how do you deal with pollution dr. friedman? and he said you tax it of course. intern lies in external commonalities, you put the cost on the product 10th market price will judge the product. people could make money without subsidies and fickle tax cuts. they could make money on solar wind and there are other ways to make electricity. host: how would thy be able to compete with the big guys who have been at this for decades? guest: we want to eliminate all the subsidies they currently enjoy but if you eliminate

biggest subsidy at all if i make cold fire electricity the biggest subsidy i get is being able to dump into the trash dump of the sky without accountability. it works great-for-me and it's pretty good for my customers except the ones that live close to my plant because they get stuff from my plant in their lunges. some cough it up but some don't and go to the hospital and then we pay in the health effects. if you make me accountable and say no, inglis, be bib lickly accountable. you can't dump on somebody else's lunges or on their property. then it changes everything. to local congress they say my energy rates will then go up and i say of course

they will but we are paying at the hospital or at the meter. wind and solar might be able to compete with me without any subsidies or expiring tax incentives in which they had a near-death experience having to come to the capital. host: who is onboard with what you're doing? guest: well, we are building right now. we have mostly millennial conservatives. their parents and grandparents are a little bit harder sell for us but young conservatives get this. they want their party, their movement to be relevant to their future, and so they say, thank goodness, somebody's finally talking a conservative sthrution climate change and thank goodness we don't have just a clean power plant to look at and rethink couldn't think of a worst way to deal

with climate change, sector by sector, prone to litigation. we've got to deal with better. better is an economy-wide, worldwide simple pricing. only rule of government is to say all cost in. all subsidies out and be the accountable cop on the beat. host: before we get to calls, are you changing any minds up on critical with your former colleagues? >> yes. what we see is some movement there of course not many are are the to come out on this, if you will, because it is still a little bit dangerous because a dominant tune on the radio is no, we don't believe in climate change. because we don't want to believe in climate change. but meanwhile, we are all experiencing climate change, and we thought it was going to be a long way away. but just look at the headlines in the paper today. it's baton rouge. it's a lot of water in the

atmosphere that came down in a flood. it's the wildfires. t's zika in miami. we are experiencing climate change right now, and of course the people that come after us are going to experience even greater effects. so once that becomes more toical, then i think we will see more members of congress saying you know, we do have to enter the competition of ideas. something overtake athing when it decides it has need, and it may just take a regulatory, really poor solution. we conservatives need to be there with a better alternative. host: let's see what our callers think. kelly from georgia, you are on the air. don't believe for

one second that republicans do not want clean air and clean water, that i think we have a problem with the hypocrisy. if you will not cut me off, hypocrisy of people, the al leonardos, when they preach to the little man, when they fly around in their r 300,000 live in thei square-foot homes, and their yachts and everything -- i wonder what that carbon footprint is doing. then they say that we have got to build bridges and y'all don't need guns, yet they are protected by big guns. wonder what that big thing is around the white house? is that a gate or is that a bridge? and last, is it true that loretta lynch and a lot of her division have been trying to put people in jail for denying

climate change? that is a lot of hypocrisy there. of course republicans want clean air and clean water. and what about the colorado river when the epa messed that up? host: let's get a reaction from the former congressman. yeah, hypocrisy is causing a lot of trouble here, holding us back. it, right?just price if some wants to have a great big house and fly around on a corporate jet, ok, as long as they are willing to pay for the emissions. all right. friedman told us, as i said earlier, just put the price in and make it so that they're fully accountable, and then they will decide and maybe they will stop taking the big car. they might get in an uber pool rather than taken the big car.

to people have the freedom decide. yet, the hypocrisy of people that preach and then do other things is a problem. pennsylvania, independent. caller: i want to ask the gentleman here, the lady before mentioned the colorado river, and i notice a big discrepancy between all the coverage that the media gave flint, michigan, and that terrible tragedy up there, and now the navajo indians out in colorado and that area have been severely impacted by an epa event that i do not think anybody in the epa has been held accountable. i agree with climate change. however, the whole people accountable is also essential, besides taxing everything. how can the epa discharge 300 million gallons of lead and

arsenic and everything else like that into the colorado river and nobody is held accountable? in flint, michigan, six or seven people are on their way to crossbar hotel, and out there in the west where the navajo indians are impacted, the clinton -- clinton -- the obama epa, ok, was completely at fault there, and these are supposed to be the smart people. host: let me show a headline from the new york times that refers to what you are talking about, navajo nation sues epa and poisoning of a colorado river. guest: they are bringing legal action for accountability. , really,nto something we do want to that kind of accountability. one of the best ways to get all of us accountable is just to make it so the market is transparent on the costs we are causing. we are all in this together. was sayingelly

earlier, this hypocrisy of thinking i am righteous and you are not, that is really a turnoff. we have to realize that we are all in this together. i rode here in a taxi that was emitting co2. , ande all in this together nobody is more righteous than and videos. it is just that we're looking for solutions. the way to solve it is the conservative way to solve it, just make us all accountable, put the costs in, make it so the marketplace is transparent. i start choosing better fuels, and i do so because now all the costs are in and i can see them. host: let me follow up on the first caller who mentioned loretta lynch and climate change deniers. about aa story

conservative media site, which reported that the attorney general had to start taking legal action against climate change deniers, focusing on testimony by loretta lynch, but it appears to exaggerate the extent to which the department of justice has gone after climate change skeptics. according to lynch's office, the action asking the fbi to investigate, it involves exxon mobil. it receivedman said a request in 2015 from two numbers of congress to investigate exxon mobil over claims the oil company misrepresented its own research on global warming. can see how so i that would be blown up into, oh, loretta lynch is going after people for speaking out against a scientific position on climate change. so it sounds like you have got it straight there, it is overstated.

but there is this question about whether some people who have an interest in this were actually hiding with a new about climate change and the science of climate change. the good news for us at republicen.org, and you just mentioned exxon mobil, is they are for what we are for. ofre focused on with the ceo exxon mobil says they are for, which is a revenue neutral carbon tax. no growth to government. apply itjustable and to imports, so they are taxed in the same way. then fix climate change through innovation. host: are you teaming up with exxon mobil? guest: we would like to from your lips to their ears. it is rather strange. we would love to be associated with them. most people working on climate

change would say, oh, no, they are not righteous and we cannot deal with them to we say, no, they are great. ,hey delivered natural gas bringing done omissions or do we do have an issue with huge commissions, of course. natural grass is a great way to reduce co2. fracking was a great think it we pretty unusual in the climate space. host: who is funding your organization? guest: some folks that believe in free enterprise. robertsone, julian has been very helpful to us. i mention him because here is a guy who is a champion of free enterprise and understands the power of free enterprise. he has clearly done quite well with free enterprise. creativity kind of -- we have seen what free enterprise can do, and that is

what we hope to spawn across the whole world even. we are grateful for those champions of free enterprise who see it and are willing to help us. host: robin in maryland, go ahead. ander: good morning, greta, good morning to the former u.s. representative from south carolina, congressman english. well done. guest: thank you, sir. caller: i hope all america is listening, democrats, independents, and republicans. this is why we're conservative. i love your ideas and think you are going in the right direction. why can't we do it like germany? i was there many years ago and bavaria, and there was not a speck of trash and the entire country. you know what i mean. i would like to hear your comments. thank you. guest: that is true. i have done just a little bit of travel in germany, and it is a very clean place. they came to south carolina to the district they used to

represent to makes a very fine cars. $6 billion on the ground in spartanburg, south carolina. are very grateful to have them. one thing i would tell you that we do differently than germany on climate is that there really acting in some funny ways. they have this way of paying people to produce solar on their roofs, which is a great idea, so we are all for solar. the problem is that they are paying through the nose for it, and they have created this in our miss subsidy. meanwhile, they are turning off new gear -- nuclear plants because of an overreaction to fukushima. they are cranking up there late night coal plant, which is a bad move when trying to solve climate change. on solar, they have created a

mass-market. the chinese enter that market and drive down prices. maybe we can run fair competition. down in solar because of what germany did, so bless them for going first. i think we can listen to some very good economists here in the u.s. about better ways to do it and better ways to eliminate all the subsidies. germany did in making it enormously expensive. rather, eliminate the subsidies, eliminate the biggest subsidy of them all. that you let me dump it to the crash and dump into the sky without paying a tipping fee. that is what needs to change. host: ronald, philadelphia, independent caller. are you there? all right, let me move on to homer and shreveport, louisiana, democrat. caller: thank you. i am a lawyer liz -- loyal listener.

i am glad to see people putting the environment above politics. we have got too many, you know, too many people want to put politics in it, and the good lord is still on the throne. thank you, and may god bless him. host: ok, let's hear from mike in washington, d.c., independent. caller: before i talk, i would like to make a request. i wish c-span would do a story on agenda 21 or agenda 30 from the u.n. this whole global warming hoax that this gentleman here is peddling is about taxes. he is trying to peddle it in a softer way. viewers should be aware that in

phonyd, al gore's documentary was sued. it was because of lies in the mockumentary about so-called global warning -- warming. host: let's get your reaction it you must hear this about agenda 21 when you are talking to republicans about this. guest: yeah, there is a lot of distressed. a lot of people distrust science. if you think about it, if you are alleging this great big conspiracy, it is really hard to pull off. usually with a conspiracy, there are just a couple people in th e know. many people get to talking, and loose lips sink ships. would be really hard for this to be an enormous conspiracy. if so, it would be the most orchestrated conspiracy ever.

think about this -- if you are a scientist, the way you make a name for yourself in the way you advance science is by challenging some underlying assumption. that is how you really make it in science. so there is every reason for all the scientists to try to challenge the assumption, but they are not. with their finding is that our data supports this data that somebody else has found, and there is quite a bit of censuses that we have got a problem. why is it that we want to go searching for the explanation that is not real? probably because we do not want to change, right? change seems scary. but in this case, change is really exciting. this is an opportunity to light of the world with more energy, more freedom. it is not about shivering in the dark, depending on the season. it is about more energy, more

mobility, more freedom. distributed energy systems that can light up dark villages in the world. it is exciting. this is not all threatening. host: our guest is the former conversation, bob inglis, from south carolina, represented the district from 2004 22010. then he was booted from congress and the primary against trey gowdy, the congressman now representing that south carolina hisrict, hardly because of views on climate change, he says, which he changed from being a denier to now believing it. he started this group, republicen.org. he is here to talk about this. j sanders on twitter has a question for you. what specifically do you propose moneywith the tax to achieve revenue neutrality? guest: great question.

i could go for corporate income tax cut, an individual income tax cut, payroll tax cut, or a dividend to put the money back to the american citizens. the key is it just be revenue control, that there cannot be growth of government. some people proposed a tax it would grow government. we are not for that. there is a revolution recently on the kaus -- house for that says we are not for carbon taxes. i might have voted for that, too, but that revolution is not what we're talking about. that is not the concept we're talking about. apparently, and that resolution, talking about a revenue positive carbon tax. all those resolution would be true, but if you make it revenue neutral by cutting taxes somewhere else or by dividending the money back and applying it to imports, wow, it is a very direct animal then.

penned thiscently piece for usa today -- gop needs to thaw on warming. that is in usa today. scientific american had this headline -- republican platform climate agreement, renewable energy cut, price on carbon opposed. approved platform was by the republican party last month with this language in it. guest: yeah, we do. grumpy old party, hopefully what we can do is reinvented as the grand opportunity party, the one that says beer relevant to the future and we are not trying to hold onto mystical days and never existed. rather, we have ideas and a ready to enter the competition of ideas. america will take something from

nothing when there is a need. asour great opportunity conservatives is to step forward with a solution now, stop the science denial. the reason we do that is we think we're no good on energy and climate, but we're really very good. and the good news is there are some progressives that agree with a spear the result is we can bring america together and solve this. the whole world is waiting on america to solve it. host: lucille in florida, republican. caller: good morning mr. inglis, originally called to ask you something about solar flares, but i need to ask something else first. listening to you about the ,arbon tax, under the gore plan apparently one company did not use all the carbon allotment, and the tax credits could be sold to another company.

so the same amount of carbon would go into the air. i need to know what you're talking about, if it is that or if you are going to use less carbon? in addition to that, there is a scientisthat is a saying that the solar flares, which have been exceptionally strong recently, is the predominant cause of the global warming. have you checked into that end of it? that is my question, and i will get off-line to listen to you. thank you for taking my call. host: all right. guest: thanks, lucille. on the solar flares, i suggest you go to a site called skeptical science, and you will see a discussion about solar flares there. talk about solar flares, especially on my side of the aisle, because they want to

find that as the explanation. but what you will see at skeptical science is that it does not correlate with the warming that we are seeing now. in fact, flair activity would cause the earth to be cooling now, rather than warming. so it does not correlate. more of that and go really deep if you want to add skeptical science. it is a neat site. about your carbon credit question, yeah, what you are describing is the complex cap and trade system. i voted against cap and trade when i was in congress. free embarrassing in the allocations to the well-connected. it would decimate american any fracturing. cap and trade is a bad idea. but we are proposing an alternative that is quite different. it is a very simple way of , inglishere is the farm industries making call file --

coal fire energy, i am making harm. if you just put those costs on me at inglis industries, make me thisntable, then through upstream application, meaning ,ou tax people at the pipeline very few people, about 2000 taxpayers, simple job for the irs. and make it so that imports have to pay and make it so you cut taxes somewhere else. then everything changes. the economics change. and i at inglis industries start losing out to some other kinds of fuels or electricity. isn't that the way the free enterprise system works? it is all about accountability. ours is a much simpler approach than the cap and trade thing that got pretty complex. host: i want to be absolutely

clear the former congressman does not own a company called inglis industries. guest: no, i do not. i wish i did maybe. host: here is a treat for you -- don't and won't work. they are 300 percent more expensive. absent subsidies from taxpayers, they would never exist. guest: well, let's see. if that is right, let's test it. if they cannot make enough subsidies, it should not be made. but i have had a lot of discussions with the wind and solar folks, and they say, yeah, inglis, if you could truly eliminate all the subsidies, including the biggest one which is the implicit subsidy, me being able to dump into the trash dump in the sky for free, eliminate that, we are competitive in wind and solar. that is exciting, because then

you have a level playing field and a competition that means that freak enterprise,'s -- free enterprise, not some well-meaning but bumbling government regulator, is making it happen. it is free enterprise. host: all right, let's go to a call from michigan, democrat. , bob andood morning you are a republican and i am a democrat, but i have to say kudos to you, because you're the first republican i have ever heard that admitted climate change is real weird that said, i want to go back to the beginning of your program when you talked about exxon mobil. of november, they admitted that back in that in 72, exxon mobil, their internal scientists admitted that in the future, climate will be a problem. that is when the republican party got on board. this is a huge issue because it

index everyone, not just democrats or republicans or even people in america. the republican party are a bunch of deniers, and i do not see how anybody could ever pull the lever for anybody that would believe in such nonsense. all you have to do is look at the satellites showing the north and south pole, greenland, any of the glaciers, they are all melting at an accelerated rate. some of the problems are being magnified by dirt they gets on the ice or the snow that draws in more heat. they talk about wind generation not being affected, well, in iowa, they get 40% of their energy from wind. if you use 100 gallons of oil a day, you're using 60. 100 train cars of coal, you're using 60. it is absurd.

let's not forget how much money the oil industry has been given to try and find oil, how much they are subsidized i our government. bob, thank you. again, you are the only republican i have ever heard that agrees that climate change is real. thank you, sir. good day. guest: the good news is that there are other republicans. it is growing. people are realizing, hey, we have got to be relevant to the future and come up with solutions. let's enter the competition of ideas. i do not know about their past and everything, but i do know about the present it presently, they are spending money to lobby api, american petroleum institute, and other entities to do what we're talking about doing. we would love for them to endorse us, because we take a different view than you do of

their merits. we do not demonize exxon mobil and my dad, 93-year-old in bluffton, south carolina, is a teeny-weeny shareholder of exxon mobil. the more, the better, as far as i am concerned. you know what, it is wealthy companies like exxon mobil, and the wealthiest country on earth, the united states, is the only one that can solve this. the solution is not going to come from poor places. it will come from wealth and the creativity we have got here. that is where it is going to come from. so we're going to unleash the power of that. that is where republicen.org is different, i suppose, then the environmental left. the environmental left makes you no, the guilty, but we say, more energy, more mobility, more freedom, and let's fill great effect exxon mobil is making

money. let them make a lot of money, and then they will innovate. twitter says this -- how about no federal disaster relief for states that deny climate change? that will wake them up quickly. guest: interesting to her the best way to get a big government is to do nothing about climate change, right? this point was made in a from called "merchants of doubt" and in a book or that title. if you want to get a big government, just do nothing about climate change. right now in louisiana, we have got a big government response underway. we have got federal money flowing to louisiana. so if you want to keep on denying climate change, you will get big government. if you want to step in now and try to head off these problems, you can get a smaller government. host: solution to climate change

is to adjust -- a tweet. joe, independent it what do you say? caller: [indiscernible] i think the argument is the wrong argument. immaterialng, it is whether there is global warming or not. what is material is the fact that those industries that have those products with emissions beyond what is considered acceptable, they did it under the sponsorship of the law. so the government is participatory on that condition we are in today. notou tax, you are correcting anything because in missions are still going on and damaging the earth if you believe in global warming. on the other hand, if the government were to set reasonable expectations of

reducing emissions in this if they do not do it in the time required, they should be shut down. host: let's get a response. guest: you well-illustrated the question at hand. you can solve this by a regulatory approach come a which you just indicated is a respectable way to deal with climate change. set the limit here and regulate down from that, and we're going to put requirements on this planet and that plant. that is one way to do it. the other way to do it is what milton friedman would say to do, sort of the author of conservatism, you tax it. that is what you do or do you put the price in on it. so then the marketplace can see the true cost you are right, exactly right, the government has been complicit in this, and

the government is us. we the people have decided to put a zero price on carbon dioxide. we are in a global economy, so if you get a carbon tax, what would be the direction from opec? guest: very important to make it border adjustable. neutralave me a revenue but not border adjustable, i do not think i could vote for it if i were still in congress because i represent a wonderful manufacturing district. a bmw plant is there, for example. but if you make it border adjustable, it becomes in the trading partner's interest to do the same thing, to join us in that same pricing of carbon dioxide. say someone is going through the port of philadelphia, they would be paying a park -- a carbon tax on entry. how long does it take to figure

out, let's see, if we collected this in china, the money would have been sent to beijing. so they would apply the same carbon tax in china, and then the whole world would follow. it is putting energy at its truer price, basically saying we see the costs and are putting them on the meter now, and then what happens is we are no longer complicit in this sort of game. you know, when you play hide and seek with your four-year-old nephew or niece, they say, you cannot see me i'm a i am hiding -- that is where we are on climate costs. they assume we are not there. they want to make believe they are zero. they are not. if we act in a reasonable way, we can get the whole world to see what we see. host: so many fractures would get a tax year for producing pollution for whatever they make, and then they would also get taxed when they should

their goods to another country? guest: it would actually be removed on export from here. imports areposed on removed on exports. but paying would be simple. joe pointed out that there is this regulatory approach, meaning a government regulator goes up to visit this planned, that plant, and that plant, and then they litigate about the regulation. that is very cumbersome, big government. the better way to do it is to say, all right, listen, the price of energy just went to its true cost as we attached those costs of the pipeline and at the mine. now every industry without any government regulator rolling out there in a government sedan sees the electricity bill, and they adjust, and we all adjust. i think by telling us what to do, we do it.

host: smitty in arizona, republican. caller: good morning, c-span. first, i would like to say that trey gowdy replacing the gentleman on there right now was probably a pretty good idea. this nonsense of man-made global warming is what people deny. they do not deny that the earth is getting warmer. it has been getting warmer since it was created, and the warmer it gets, the more food we can grow and everything else. the problem with these climate change people is that, one, they want to put people in jail if you do not believe their ideas hear it but they are working with our computer models, and their computer models have shown themselves to be wrong like 99% of the time. they are trying to claim they know with the climate is going to be like 50 years from now, but they cannot tell you what the climate is going to be like two weeks from now. this is a bunch of crap.

host: let's take your point. guest: yeah, smitty, a little bit of an overstatement, don't you think? that is the best thing about not being in congress, you can say right back to people, does that make sense what you said, that 99% of the time the models are wrong? if that were true, how would anybody maintain scientific credentials or integrity? just think about that review said 99% of the time, the models are wrong. it just cannot be true what you said. so for anybody listening that thinks, you know, smitty, that beeneen the talk we have using for while, but meanwhile, we are all experiencing climate change. experience is a very effective, but often a very harsh teacher. we are experiencing it right now. the world is looking for a solution, waiting for america to

lead the road i agree, a lot of people in my party are too tired to lead. they have given up. us,the rest of us, some of ,e are ready to lead, come on let's enter the competition of ideas. the left has said let's regulate it down with government regulators and government sedans going out to all these plants. we say, no, a small band of conservatives, but a growing band, says we have a much better way to deal with it. and we listen to people like one of the fathers of conservatism, milton freedom, so let's fix this through the power of economics. ,ost: pikesville, maryland independent. caller: i appreciate the ex- congressman and his ideas. the problem with america, right or left, is one wants to demonize the other. the idea that china has, and if we do not adopt this idea of

private part ships and government having the most money, taking the most risks, the private can link into the economy. ago, i heard the president of china said he wants 60,000 miles of highways, trains, and other transportation sources, and the government will subsidize this. they will create the playing field, and then the private guys can do it. do you know now that they have magnetic trains and new buses that run? very interesting bus system. they have many highways that the government said, let's have it. so i think we need to listen to some of the other programs, like the coast-to-coast. and said at the university of san diego years ago, the students could create a

car that would get 100 miles per gallon. and the other day i heard that a magneticas source. there is another way of developing solar panels. there is a solar cell that is not silicon-based that is almost 90% effective in capturing the sun it to electricity. why not merge they government that the government started and stop criticizing and demonizing each other. to wipe us out. >> we have heard your point. >> we don't need to demonize each other. some systems are better than others. better than the chinese system. if we let it work. if we fix the economic fear, it will work better and faster than the chinese system.