russian interference in the 2016 election. be sure to watch, live at 7:00 eastern on tuesday morning. join the discussion. president trump is skipping the annual white house correspondents dinner again this year and will hold a campaign rally instead in green bay, wisconsin. watch live coverage of the rally saturday on c-span at 8:00 p.m. eastern. following the rally, watch live coverage of the white house correspondents dinner featured speaker, ron chernow. ,> environmentalist denis hayes national coordinator of earth day in 1970, talks about next year's 50th anniversary. the national press club hosted the event.

good morning. i am the 112th president of the national press club. if everybody could turn off arer cell phones, there cameras in the room. thank you. >> the united states will completely with drop in the paris climate agreement next year. there is a crisis of plastic waste in our ocean. i would like to wish our guest today, denis hayes, a happy 49th birthday. 49 years ago in 1970, hayes helped launch the first earth day.

it was a time when america's eagle, the bald was listed as an endangered species. cities like los angeles was routinely enveloped in thick smog and the cuyahoga river in cleveland was so polluted, caught fire. on the first earth day, 20 million people participated in demonstrations in the effort launched a sweeping series of policy changes in the united states including the clean air act, the clean water act and the establishment of the environmental protection agency. today, hayes is chairman of earth day which focuses attention on the state of the earth's hell just health. as he looks for his golden anniversary, he is focused on

what he says is the biggest threat or plants health, climate change. he wants next year's 50th anniversary to produce an unprecedented global outpouring of outrage over climate change and other global threats. we will hear more about those plans this morning so please join me in welcoming dennis hayes to the national press club. [applause] mr. hayes: thank you very much. the 50th anniversary of earth day next year will be the largest most diverse action i believe, in human history. we plan to engage more than 3 billion people in 190 countries. we have made these kinds of claims before and often done so with some level of trepidation, and in every case it has proven to be more modest than what actually transpired. for the first birthday, we hoped to have millions and in the end we had earth day 1990, we 20 million. aspired to 100 countries and 100

million people, at the end, we people and 140 countries. i'm hoping was again in 2020 we will blow past our goals. more important, 2020 will mark the time when global carbon emissions stop growing and begin to decline. for more than two centuries, annual carbon emissions have been growing and they have their highest levels ever in 2018. worse, carbon emissions actually accelerated after a scientific consensus had developed around climate change. mankind has pumped more carbon into the atmosphere in the 30 1988 one john henson testified before congress than in the 200 years before that of human history. although president trump has taken a wrecking ball to international climate and scoffed at peer-reviewed

science, and appointed the two worst epa administrator's in history and pledged to resist a a dead coal industry, i'm confident the end is in sight . when conditions are right, people are ready to demand change and america can turn on a dime. it recently happened in the united states on gay marriage. more recently it happened in new zealand on gun control. it happened globally on the ozone hole. the 20 million americans are turned out in 1970 catapulted the environment from a second tier issue to a top-tier issue in politics. throughout that spring, events focused on air and water pollution, toxic oil spilled, pesticides, burning rivers, lead paint, dying makes, we literally saturated the public consciousness. several of the dirty dozen income and members of congress who went down in defeat, where the environment provided the margin of victory. these included the chair of the house public works committee.

powerful laws that had been unthinkable in 1969 became unstoppable by the end of 1970. within just five years of that first earth day, america past -- the clean air act, the clean water act, the endangered species act, the occupational health and safety act, the safe drinking water acts, we established the e.p.a., we band lead-based paint, we and reset atband cafe mileage standards for automobiles, we passed the substance control act and the recovery act, and the national forest act. we launched an revolution in the way america does business. consider just the clean air act, despite the passionate opposition of the oil industry, the coal industry, the automobile industry, the electric utility industry, the steel industry and others, the clean air act passed the senate unanimously and the house with just one dissenting vote.

when richard nixon vetoed the clean water act in 1972, the senate voted 52-12 to override his veto and the house voted 247-23. anddifference between 1970 1969 was the difference between night and day. it was not limited to the government, millions of people began choosing their homes, jobs, cars, their diets, even choosing how many children to have based on environmental values. why do we believe that 2020 will be for climate what 1970 was for other environmental issues? because just as in 1969, we have a supersaturated social situation. every recent poll shows a strong majority believes that climate change is real and has a human fingerprint. the lavishly funded multi-year disinformation campaign funded by the fossil fuel industry, most notably, accent, has been thoroughly discredited. for many decades, every poll

that showed a large majorities of the public favor a swift transition to 100% clean, renewable energy sources. as in 1970, the young people who have to live with the problem are stirring. fridays for future student strikes inspired by a -- gretald girl mobilized 1.6 million strikers in 125 nations on march 15, another international strike is being organized for may 24. smaller strikes in individual countries are taking place every the ipcc has reports that grows friday. densely grown more forceful. the most recent one concluded that for there to be any reasonable hope of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, humankind must reduce our emissions by 50% by 2030. that is as close to a clarion call for action as you'll ever find in a responsible scientific report.

pope francis and a constellation of other religious leaders are addressing this as a moral issue. not as a political issue. more than 200 cities and states, including california, representing 1.3 billion people and nearly 40% of the global economy, have pledged to reduce their emissions by 80-90% by 2050. washington, d.c. has pledged to be 100% renewable by 2032, the most ambitious target in the nation. the solutions project has developed roadmaps showing how states and 139 nations can achieve 100% clean. the climate action 100+ group of pension funds, insurance companies, foundations and other institutional investors with more than $32 trillion of investments under management are pressuring the 100 largest companies with major carbon footprints to align their spending with what's needed to limit warming to two degrees. and a few companies, including some giants like google, ikea,

and mars, have pledged to us if we achieve 100% clean. more than 6000 corporations now report their carbon footprints to the carbon disclosure project , and once you begin measuring something, you can begin to manage it. public health officials routinely speak of climate change as a health threat. citervation biologists climate change as a driver of extinction. on the upbeat side of all of this, the cost of battery storage has fallen so precipitously over the last few years that in most places, 100% renewable energy solution is now the cheapest, healthiest, most resilient option as well as the one least dependent on the political whims of foreign sources of supply. the electric automobile revolution launched by tesla is spreading like wildfire. virtually every car company will have electric cars available by the end of this year. prices are falling, mileage is increasing, charging times are

shrinking, and personal cars, buses and trucks are all on the cusp of a revolution. a similar opportunity lies in taking green buildings to scale. a six story commercial building that i developed in seattle uses less than half as much energy as a leed platinum building and generates more electricity from rooftop solar. the cloudiest major city in seattle, generates more than it uses. it's the most comparable building in the city, is fully and has been operating in the black since the day it opened. this is not rocket science. this is smart design and it simply about priorities, it's a bout developers telling their architects, engineers and thisactors, that "i want building to perform in a way that is sustainable for the ."ture/ the goal is to invest deeply inefficiency and electrify everything and produce all the electricity from renewable sources.

finally, what will the earth day campaign itself look like? earth day which you should view as a meme rather than a vent -- rather than just an event, will do its best to make sure public consciousness is against saturated with climate solutions. regional organizers will catalyze coalitions in cities to create their own events and we will work with national and state education associations to get climate programs focused on solutions into every school, her -- our children already understand the threats, and we need to make sure they also know what is needed. we need to make sure that they have some hope. we plan to enlist seniors. historically, most social movements are powered by youth. certainly, the first earth day was. but many of those activists, from the 1960's and the 1970's are now retired. our values are intact, we have more leisure time than we've had in decades, and some of us feel

guilty about our failure to make progress on climate during the period were actually in power. i pray for the emergence of a green grey movement. experts will work with partners to get climate solutions programs into museums, libraries zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens and athletic venues. i met with soccer officials two weeks ago on athletic venues. we will talk with the smithsonian this afternoon to talk about museums and disease. the gap between the fabulously wealthy and the destitute has never been greater here and in the rest of the world, and energy resolution could consolidate even more wealth and it even more hands, or it could work to help disadvantaged communities to help ensure the well-being of the poor in this comity and the destitute of the world. to enlist the next generation of environmental activists, we have to engage with social media platforms, and will be jointly

announcing a major year-long partnership with twitter later today. we also hope to work closely with instagram, interest, pblr, wechat, facebook, and others which have not been invented yet. we plan to enlist an army of digital natives to convey memorable messages reaching the largest possible audience of their peers. has a varietywn of options for individuals to modify their individual consumption to significantly reduce their carbon impact. we have an alliance, a drawerdown alliance to reach out to a broad audience to help them live their values. later this year, the network will release is citizens ryan's at downloaded -- citizen science ap downloaded to any smartphone, that will make itp thus to anyone to answe upload answers to questions from crowd sourced data from around the world. finally, there's an effort designed around the american

elections in 2020 but also the elections that will be held over the next two years in 60 other nations to make sure that climate becomes a top-tier issue, one of the two or three issues on which people vote. our aim is to achieve that catapulting of climate at the same time that we are working with partner organizations to register new voters and make sure they turnout at the polls. the goal for earth day 2020, bus, is to mobilize the broadest -- the goal of earth day 2020 is to mobilize the broadest possible moment. it is designed to inspire hope in people who know their political and economic systems have been failing the planet but can be aroused to enact change. happy to take any questions that you may have. >> let's go with the first question. you talk about vote earth in 2020 and in other elections

around the world. are you advocating for candidates or policies? how is that going to look? mr. hayes: we will be trying to make every candidate address climate as a priority issue. for the last several gettions, we hav to one question on climate introduced into the presidential debates and failed. this time, we want a presidential debate that is devoted to climate so that people don't just give a rhetorical flourish but have to address in detail what it is they want to do. we will be working with a wide variety of partner organizations, some of which are c4s, who endorsed their candidates based on their records and their pledges. , so we will provide the context within which that will florist. >> i have seen some criticism of earth day among environmentalists who say it's become more of an event, celebration and less of a policy

-driven issue, something like national ice cream day. it sounds like you're looking to change. do you say about the criticism over the last two years. mr. hayes: if you're to ask folks who were involved in movements for human rights, for peace, for any number of road issues, whether they would like to have a worldwide event where, even for one day, the planet focuses upon the issues, and they are resoundingly debated, but in the and if you believe in democracy, that debate will produce good results, i think everyone of it. would leap at the environmental movement was blessed with this event. not to be sure, many of the things it does is just introducing people to the issues. you take a sixth grader out and they pick up and recycle some aluminum cans and perhaps plants ame trees, that first step is

step down a long journey. i know any number of people who planted a tree when they were in grade school for earth day event took their children out to see that tree when it was 25 or 30 to show thatst they were taking their grandchildren out to see that tree. it is a wide variety of things for a word for every of people but we definitely want this on to have an impact. we have run out of time. it is time now to move aggressively on climate. >> any questions out here? reporter: since you will be accepting donations, are there any restrictions on donations? because some energy companies are claiming that they are all about dealing with a problem. mr. hayes: for those who might not have heard, there are restrictions on donations.

i suspect that given our theme, we will not be having ask and and peabody eating our doors to make contributions to us, but if they do, we will turn it down. just as we turned down a contribution from exxon back in 1970. what are referred to as a giggle test. if you take a look at the source of the contribution and you say my lord, what were they thinking, of course we will turn it down. >> you may have already touched on this, but are you working with conservation biologist to address the issue of increasing extinction? people have great affection for their favorite issues. -- their favorite species, and i am wondering if you would like to leverage that, especially museums.dren, and with and also a follow-up question, are you going to address the koch brothers' sponsorship of many exhibitions to the

smithsonian and other national museums? mr. hayes: the first question is easier. yes, we're working closely with conservation organizations and the principal theme of earth day as you might've seen from the polar bear downstairs [laughter] is upstairs now, is extinction. we now are facing literally an epidemic of extinction. it's proceeding as a rate approximately 1000 times the background rate before the evolution of homo sapiens. it's caused by variety of factors, but most biologists now would say that one is habitat loss and the other is climate change, and the two interact with one another. sure, that would be an important part of our message. while we have seen a fairmount of coverage of polar bears and extinctions, there has been

somewhat less coverage of the impact on human beings and particularly on the destitute of the world. so we will also be trying to focus as much attention as you can up on it. for example, climate migration, as places become desiccated and people can no longer live in a place, inundated in some ways, like bundle -- and other coastal communities, they have to go someplace. that is causing incredible political tensions that we want to queue up as a climate issue, not just a political issue. we will be working closely with the word for ready of museums. i don't believe the koch brothers will be sponsoring anything that we are working on with museums. and that is not part of our mission to tell the smithsonian whether they can take some amount of money from any source to talk about dinosaurs. what we're trying to do is run an adventure on climate. >> anybody else?

>> i have another question. >> you mentioned the bullet center, you are the head of the bullit foundation, which as you mentioned in your talk, will be a very environmentally-friendly building. i'm interested in what you are learning from that that can be used in old buildings like this. you can't knockdown new york city and create a new set of buildings, but are you bringing this license? mr. hayes: sure. -- are you bringing those lessons? mr. hayes: sure. first of all, let me be clear, we're not creating the bullet center, it was completed five years ago. it has been characterized by world architecture as one of the grizzlies in the world. our tenants are not greenpeace. they are commercial tenants. and despite all of that, we use less than half the energy per square foot of the leed platinum building. in the cloudiest major city in the contiguous 48 states.

, wea six-story structure produce more electricity than the building uses on average basis. if we can do it in seattle, for heaven sakes, what is up, phoenix? [laughter] it's been fully tenanted and it costs no more than a conventional office building. that is a little misleading, we don't have a parking garage for automobiles. savings.a great we are on a major part of the transit route in downtown seattle and we found that having a garage for bicycles and rapid access to transit, that we have had no difficulty getting it tenanted. the lessons learned are interesting. even in seattle come by pretty green city, there were probably two dozen laws and regulations against voting the kind of building rebuilt. probably the biggest challenge to this was persuading the regulators and the city council to let us build a super green

building. that will be a challenge throughout the country, but i think by mobilizing around climate and mickey people , werstand this is important will sweep away a number of those prescriptive regulations in favor of performance regulations. a great deal of flexibility to creative architects and engineers as long as they meet really tough performance standards. >> can you give us an example of what would have been barred? [laughter] mr. hayes: this will undercut something that i said a little bit earlier about our roof. if you look at the bullit center, our roof extends out over the sidewalks that surround the building. ,ou get a lot of surface area simple geometry surrounding the circumference of the building. but that is all owned by the city, and the city, under american common law, whoever owns property does it from the center of the earth to the full

extent of the universe. if you are building over a sidewalk, the city has to give you permission. the city wanted to charge us something like $65,000 a year to extend our roof over the sidewalks. got try to say, you've these really strong promotional things encouraging solar energy and by doing that, you're just making it impossible. we cannot be in that zero positive. not on that, because it rains so much in seattle, our roof is actually providing a public amenity. so it is little things like that . reporter: you mentioned that washington, d.c. is committed to becoming 100% renewable. that sounds pretty ambitious and a little unrealistic. is it possible? mr. hayes: if you are saying possible technically, i suppose, yes. is it highly probable, i might refer to the person who actually lives here and undoubtedly follows the debate much

closer, joe. but a lot of these goals are aspirational goals. it is a set of thing that you see with the green new deal which talks really about power and not about energy, and typically, in energy walker says, that means you are talking about electricity. . they are and are mostly ambitious for electricity and probably impossible for energy. similarly, whenever you cite sounds a most impossible, if you get close to it, it is a success. if kennedy's restoration to get a man on the moon in 10 years 11 been a man on the moon in years or 13 years or 15 years, would that have been a failure? no. it was a grand goal that serve to inspire people to move aggressively toward it. i suspect that's what going on in d.c.

>> there is an enormous amount of outrage going on in society and around the world especially among young people. the first earth day was born out of outrage, tapping into the energy of the antiwar movement as well as the outrage at environmental degradation. my question is, how have things changed, how do you see the role of you people are changing around the world. you were 25, as you say, an old timer. you mobilized the first earth day. what opportunities are there to channel this outrage into something meaningful, actionable and deliverable? mr. hayes: often the toughest thing is to get attention. what they have done with these is to capture the

world's attention, and doing it the student strikes, with lone individual sitting on a park bench in front of the united nations event through the storms of december and january. stepping outby into traffic in london and causing the mayor of london, who is a strong climate advocate to say, could you be a little less disruptive? and they say no, these are our futures. if you're a little late today, then let's change the policies we can do this best so we don't have to do this. one of the things about being young is you are both young, outraged and hopeful. when you are young, you don't know what is impossible, and therefore, you go out and do it. >> any more questions? >> thank you for being here. can you tell me about the epa today, and what we can do? [laughter] mr. hayes: there is a two-day

conference starting tomorrow at american university in the future of the e.p.a. that will have several bipartisan former epa administrator's will be addressing the topic with detail and sophistication. clearly, it has been catastrophic, the worst two administrators in history appointed by the trump administration. , what isw considering going on with the supreme court, starting to think of gorsuch of the good gorsuch. it is hard. [laughter] but in the reagan administration, an -- under an gorsuch, and someone else who because of her behavior was actually thrown in the slammer, it got about as bleak as we thought it could get. then bill ruckelshaus came in and inspire the agency and brought in a whole bunch of new people and revitalized it and it

started going again. when we passed the laws i talked about in the early 1970's, they were brand-new approaches to things. we didn't know what would work or wouldn't work. we just knew we would pass this. we stuff that would work, would amend and that's how the system functions. after the reagan years, things became so polarized, we became afraid to go back to modifications and make things even better. we all concurred they would because congress might very well use that opportunity to make it work. if we can create an election once again were the environment becomes a voting issue, then we can go back and not only get the e.p.a. revitalized, in a new administration, but be able to go in and make sure that all of not as superb and their impact as they would be, but often alienated people who should have been their friends, can be made better. >> i don't want this to be the last question but some people

think that nuclear is a viable alternative with new technologies. mr. hayes: this is one of those cases where there is a dream out there that people have for the future that is being used to sell something that doesn't yet exist. what they are trying to sell right now are light water reactors. there is no way america can rely upon any technology as a core part of its energy future that is unprepared to share with the rest of the world and there's something away to share a complete nuclear fuel cycle for the current reactors without having significant threats of new weapons florida federation being a part of that. there is nothing iran is doing to have an independent fuel cycle. there are on paper some reactors that would make proliferation difficult and would burn up much of the waste, which should be

inherently safe. none of them exist. everything is on paper. the committee will be divided at a point when some of those because somest, people, myself among them, are worried about that technology. i think the principal answer is simply without getting into the morality of plutonium, waste storage and potential accidents and what chernobyls have you of these things, again, as they learn from it around the world, i think economics and timing will be the -- as they road, iate around the think economics and timing will be the driving factors for the foreseeable future. we can put up a wind turbine, a wind farm in a matter of a couple of years. we put the solar panels all over the roof my building in a matter of weeks. from the time you decide to go ahead, a long time before that, but from the time you decide to go ahead, it will be 10-20 years to build a nuclear power plant today.

and if we haven't pretty much solve this problem within the next 20 years, it is simply too late. >> i'm wondering if you're working with the national governors association and mayors , they seem to be much more receptive to aggressive climate action in particular. hayes: pretty much, the closer a government entity is to the people, the stronger it tends to be on these things. the greatest progress and commitments have been at the city and state level. i am on the board of this organization, i actually don't know about all the staff contacts that have been made with those various organizations. i know that we had some outreach mayors, and over the course of the next several months, we will be reaching out to governors as well. internationally, at all levels of government, but with a

real emphasis upon those who are responsive to citizen pressure is the core of what this campaign is about. i will give you one small example of where we have done this in the past, some ways, a earth day inssue, its early days was often put together in communities by ecology center's who got as part of their budgets, money from recycling. that meant that people put their in cans, aluminum cans, newspapers, their glass, into the backseat of a automobile and turn them to an ecology center. it was stupid. you were spending far more energy than you are saving. but it was an environmental fact that people did this. we had to have curbside recycling. so earth day in 1990, and we decided that would be our theme, we found a couple of cities who had good curbside recycling programs going -- san jose,

california, and seattle. we took those programs to the conference of mayors and said, hey, in a couple of years, there will be a big earth day in your city, it would be nice if you could have something you could announce as a great victory. here are two ordinances that work, what you adopt them? and if you take a look between an explosion, just of curbside recycling programs and a dramatic increase in the amount of materials recycled, because it is simply making it easy for mayors to do something that is responsive to the citizens demands. all that was in itself a huge change for los angeles who was elected mayor long before earth day, on a pledge that if you elect me mayor, you will not have to segregate your garbage. now people are prepared to separate their garbage between things that can recycled and not recycled. >> art earth day goals aligned

with those? >> the sustainable development goals which are vastly better known elsewhere in the world than they are in the united states i think because great deal of sense. they have within them that every that, degree of emphasis that i refer to well in my roo remarks, that also contain a dramatic commitment to an efficient renewable future perfectly aligned with what we're trying to do. the secretary-general of the united nations rather famously said that moving aggressively -- failing to move aggressively on climate is not only immoral, it is suicidal. and i think we are in alignment with that. >> can i go back to recycling for just one are you concerned about the future of recycling based on the current set of economics, and china no longer warning to purchase our recyclables? mr. hayes: we should never have been sending our recyclables to china. it is stupid to say.

send these things across the ocean. we should be taking care of this ourselves. the reason is because we were sending them contaminated stuff it.hey weren't able to use so it a container ship full of a sec of the materials that would then go to a landfill in china, they got fed up with that. if we will be moving to a true it circular economy and we need to address it in a more comprehensive way than a curbside recycling that i spoke ,f before, which in many cities including half of seattle, has led to putting all your recyclables in one container, and then having some kind of mechanical process using magnet, blowing plastics out, to separate it. that has not worked. mostly because people recycle glass in the same containers. glass breaks, the glass shards contaminate the entire rest of the load. in the load that has glass shards in it becomes landfill

waste. we have to do this and i were is much more sensible and comprehensive. that is not our theme right now, it was our theme a few years ago. but right now, the focus is climate. questions? any more we would take just a moment to let you all know about some upcoming events at the press club. haverow at noon, we will larry kudlow, the president top economic advisor here. on friday, we have the founder -- panera bread company and on may 2, we have an event called night out for austin, a nationwide event to help raise money and awareness for a journalist named austin syria.being held in you can come to the restaurant here and a portion of what you spend will be donated to a fund, or you can look on the website, and find a restaurant near you.

so please go there and look for a place to eat on may 2 to hop a journalist in need. thank you very mr. hayes, for being here. we are adjourned. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] announcer: here is a look at our live coverage tuesday. on c-span, white house economic adviser larry kudlow talks about the state of the u.s. economy and resend trends in the stock market, from the national press p.m. t 12:30

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