program. we begin this evening with china and evan osnos, a writer for the new yorker magazine whose book is called "age of ambition: chasing fortune, truth and faith in the new china." >> the united states today, even in the, shall we say, complicated moment in which we find ourselves, we still represent something unusual in the world, and something distinctive, something specific, some idea that we are the country of last resort, we are the currency of last resort. china is not there yet, and it's not yet articulating a message that people around the world say that's where i want to go, that's the country -- that will be the secret to success for me here and abroad. >> charlie: we continue this evening with jo nesbo a very popular norwegian cultural hero and writer of crime fiction. >> i'm a storyteller.

my ambition is to, at some point, be able to write something truly original, to say something that is true that hasn't been said before. of course, that is extremely ambitious, and i don't think i have been able to do that yet, but i have to keep that ambition, you know. i have to have something that will make me get up in the morning, and i think just doing that, just writing something that lasts longer than i have. >> charlie: we conclude this evening with another look at the environment from fred krupp, president of the environmental defense fund. >> what most people don't know, charlie, is the global warming being caused by today's emissions, half of that is being caused not by carbon dioxide but by the short-lived climate pollutants and, of that half, methane is two-thirds of that,

the most important. so it turns out that, right now, we have a tremendous opportunity to take a bite out of america's footprint on global warming by reducing the emissions of these methane from oil and gas. >> charlie: osnos, nesbo and krupp when we continue. >> there's a saying around here: you stand behind what you say. around here, we don't make excuses, we make commitments. and when you can't live up to them, you own up and make it right. some people think the kind of accountability that thrives on so many streets in this country has gone missing in the places where it's needed most. but i know you'll still find it,

when you know where to look. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> charlie: evan osnos is here. he is a staff writer at "the new yorker" magazine. he was the magazine's china correspondent from 2005 to 2013, has written a book about his experiences in a country undergoing rapid change as you know. it is called "age of ambition: chasing fortune, truth and faith in the new china." george packer has said evan osnos gives us 21st century china the way best american journalists gave us "the guilded

age." pleased to have him back at this table. welcome. >> thanks. >> charlie: george was rather cornecomplimentary, wasn't he? >> well, he knows the guilded age. >> charlie: why is it hard to define the ambition of china? >> it operates on two levels. you have the national ambition that's clear to us, the one we see here. >> charlie: and talk about. and talk about, the one pushing china out into the south china and the east china sea. that's remarkable to see. the one that's harder to see when you live on the ground and talk to people in china is their ambition in their personal and private lives and their families which is to transform themselves through this economic metamorphosis that the country is going through. >> charlie: you have been interested in the individual life for a while since you got to china. >> that's right. that surprised mow when i got there. everything i always studied was about the collective experience.

it's a confucius society, a socialist country, and i found out people weren't talking about groups, that they were talking about themselves. and that forced me to really re-think how i understood the way that the society was organized. >> charlie: so you look at the profiles and it's part of the week book which is the idea of the people. let me talk about the broader picture. this book says something about china. you and your publisher obviously looked into the idea of the book being published in china. >> that's right. >> charlie: it is not being published in china. >> it is not. i thought about it. chinese publishers said they'd like to publish the book, based on the work i'd done at "the new yorker." >> charlie: right. there is a big market for foreign authors being published in china. i love the idea of reaching chinese readers because it feels like a fair bargain to give back a story to them that i pulled from them in the last eight years, but in order to publish

to chinese, i would have to make substantive cuts about dissidents and political things. >> charlie: everybody including the president of the united states. >> exactly. everybody's book sold in china would have to pass through the censors. some would be small and some big. i decided i didn't want to cut it because it would give an unfair picture to the reader. >> charlie:. >> charlie: do you think it will get there anyway? >> i'm sure. i'm publishing it in taiwan and it will get to the chinese readers. >> charlie: why the title dividing, chasing fortune, truth and faith? >> these are the three engines propelling china. the one most apparent to us is the search for fortune. everybody gets up and says how will i get one step closer to the prosperous lifestyle. >> charlie: and why not. yes, that's the most universal element. but as they accumulate property,

they discover they can no longer afford to be ill-informed, because you have to know who's setting the rules and where to the rules lie and where are they going. and that fed the extraordinary investigative impulse which had never been possible in china. so i met all the great reporters and editors over the years who were doing incredible work under very difficult conditions. >> charlie: and they are totally truthful and candid in private conversation? >> oh, they'll tell you all kinds of things. a lot of the stories are western journalists are first tipped off to us by friends in the chinese press who say i'd love to write this story, you need to do it. the third piece is faith, which is what happens after you've satisfied basic questions about law and politics. you say what is my role as a citizen, family member, as a privately person. >> charlie: what does it mean to be human. >> the big existential questions. today there are as many

christians as members of the communist party in china, you have tycoons and everything in between. >> charlie: when did the new china begin? >> 1978. that's the moment when the country was liberated from social economics. they held on to mao and the imagery of the party of the people's republic of china. the word chinese use about the moment when people were sent out on their own is soonbom (phonetic) which means literally to unfetter a prisoner or animal. >> charlie: to release. exactly. it's a visceral picture. that's the way it felt with people. they were sent out on their own to find out for themselves. >> charlie: who educated him? in the end, it was survival

that drove his decision. he recognized he was not an economist and he was the first to say that, but he was smart and surrounded himself with great economic minds and practical people, and they realized the mao era economics was leading them to ruin. in 1978, china had a lower standard of living than north korea per capita income. if they continued on that path, everything they fought for in the revolution would be lost. he realized he could relinquish a fancy of a certain kind of collective economy but they could hold on to power. so he struck a unique bargain which is this authoritarian system with this raucous free market society, and trying to put those into a single portrait. >> charlie: we'll let you have a better china if you let us rule it. >> right, and that's been the bargain, certainly since tiananmen. it sometimes works, right. >> charlie: how do you define what it means to be chinese

today? what is the operative philosophy? the american ideal. >> there's a shared american idea. in the end, if you had to put an end to it, it would be something like liberty. >> charlie: exactly. in china today, there is no single shared idea and i think that makes people uncomfortable. what the government is trying to do is to say the shared idea should be renewal, rejuvenation, it should be the flag. >> charlie: yeah. i think people are not convinced of that. if you talk to people about what they call the chinese dream, this is now an official slogan as you've seen it -- >> charlie: so in the person of ping. >> right, ping got to power and said we need better marketing. we're now in pursuit of the chinese dream, an el gent solution for propaganda problems. everyone interpreted it differently. the conclusion i reached after thinking about it a long time is the thing people are looking for now and however they define it

is dignity, and for some people, dignity comes in the form of enormous financial success. finally, they've arrived. but for other people, dignity comes in the ability to have something small but have it be yours. and that's a change because, in the past, there really wasn't much rule in the chinese cosmology for individual dignity and now particularly young people are going out and saying i want to live a certain kind of life. >> charlie: what are the contradictions and the fault lines? >> a few specific things. you can't talk about china today without talking about the gap between the rich and poor. it's vast and getting bigger. that's not unique to china. we're dealing with a lot of the same questions in the united states. the difference is that china is still run by the communist chinese party and creates a day to day contradiction people are confronted with. the environment is an enormous issue. four years ago, it would have been much lower on the list of priorities, and today if you talk to any chinese political

leader, they say dealing with the environment has become an urgent political issue because they're taking the middle class who don't really care about joining demonstration but they will if they think it helps the health of their kids. >> charlie: when i talk to somebody who's been there, they say what i have to do is do something about corruption, the environment and to do something to ensure a stable growth pattern, those are the mandates. >> and you've seen him put corruption at the top of the list. i think corruption is in some ways the meta issue for all the things we're talking about because it's about a government that ceased to function on some level for the purposes of benefiting the individual citizen. that's the way it's perceived and that's certainly the way he's framed it. what he's said is he's trying to hit the reset button on his own government's performance, and he's saying we're now going to reorient so we're in the service

of the public. hard to do. >> charlie: how much self-analysis are they prepared engage in, the party and the standing committee and the people who influence decisions made by the government? >> they are prepared to do an operational self-analysis, but not the kind of metaphysical self-analysis that would undermine their political hold. what he is doing with corruption is real. he is going after people at the highest levels. you will see more big arrests over the months to come. kong is the former security chief, head of the state oil company, there's been rumors for months he'll go down, he will be the highest ranking since the people's republic. >> charlie: once they convict him, it's pretty severe, right? >> could go to prison the rest of his life or the death penalty. he hasn't been formally indicted yet. >> charlie: but that's the talk. >> certainly everywhere. i was in beijing in china the last month and everyone is

waiting for the other shoe to drop. but the corruption campaign has its limits and you heard recently the former president sent the message to the president ping saying let's not go overboard. >> charlie: why is he wanted that? >> he's concerned if you go after him, you could go after everybody. >> charlie: nobody's immune. if you're another official, it makes you uncomfortable because it breaks the rules of the game -- i won't go after your big family if you don't go after mine. the leaders have a reason to not want this to become full-scale

intraparty war fair. >> charlie: they did the study about his family and how much he made. he was the premier. >> exactly. >> charlie: anything happen to him because of all the press? >> no, he left office and is a private citizen. it tends to be the chinese political culture is after you leave office you stop having a public role and you still maintain some private role. you know, the word in beijing is that experience in which the "new york times" disclosed his family accumulated somewhere on the order of $2 billion in assets over his time in office that that was obviously damaging to him in his reputation in the west but put him in a complicated position in chinese politics because the way that was interpreted was he doesn't have control over his own family, that if he can't keep his cousins and siblings and wife as the story described from profiting from his name then this is a sign of weakness

personally, so i think that's been damaging to him as well. >> charlie: tell me some of the individual stories people hear of people you've met while in china. >> i think the guy i write about nobody knows is a young english teacher, chinese son of a coal miner and i learned a lot from spending time with him over the last few years because he's a guy by all chinese metrics should be happy today because his life is unimaginably better than his father's. his father spend 30 years underground and michael, as he calls himself, his son, michael can go online and watch anything he wants more or less on western sitcoms, read in english and that kind of stuff, but when i talk to him about his life, he's frustrated he can't get traction. this is a subtle thing that doesn't come through in the gdp numbers every day is he feels

frustrated, the opportunity that existed for his peer group five or ten years ago is narrowing, and this is a real problem for china because the bargain that was struck was your life will get better every year and they have to try to figure out how to do that at the same time the economy is slowing down. he said why is it i should be just like everybody else because i was born to a poor family, by we he means i have an individual sense of my ambitions and desire and because i was born poor doesn't mean i should have something small. >> charlie: what does confucius say about the individual? >> he didn't put much stock in the individual. what a lot of the philosophers of ancient china believed was you have to have a system to control the wayward appetites of the public. i think the political powers still believe that and that's what edescribe in the book is

the power of the individuals to define their sense of a good life and the state that believes they can tell you we can tell you what the chinese dream is, we know what's good for you, trust us, and the people don't know if they're willing to trust them. >> charlie: will the communist party survive? >> it's extraordinarily adaptable and much more adaptable and pragmatic than i thought. if i had to guess what would happen, i think that the communist party will ready fine itself in order to survive. it's already shown it's not going to stay attached to communist economics. >> charlie: what'sest thing that -- what's the biggest thing that stands in the way of china being able to play a significant role in the world, have a global ambition and be accepted as a player and be able to do the things it wants to do at home as well? >> i think one of the things that's been a surprise over the last few years is we suspected china's soft power push would be

really effective. five or ten years ago if we had this conversation we would talk about the money they spent on television and radio in africa and they pushed the message out effectively and created the infrastructure for that, but what you don't see is there are people in name the country -- kenya, nigeria -- saying we want to adopt chinese political values. they want chinese investment, money. >> charlie: will sell them our natural resources. >> but we also face the risk our own politicians get criticized for being "in bed with the chinese." so what i think is a harder thing for the chinese to fix is to sell a persuasive political message. >> charlie: but it goes against the grain of the way they have conducted their foreign policy which has been described as ago gnostic -- gnostic. >> they're noninterventionist and means they don't have an

affirmative message to send. >> charlie: it's a transactional relationship. >> completely. and i think at the end of the day in these days, particularly america, we don't have a memory of when we had a moral glamour on the world stage, but we did. i can tell you as someone who lived abroad the last eleven years, the united states today, even in the complicated moment in which we find ourselves, we still represent something unusual in the world, and something distinctive, something specific, some idea that we are the country of last resort, we are the currency of last resort. china is not there yet, and it's not yet articulating a message that people around the world say, that's where i want to go, that's the country -- that will be the secret to success for me here and abroad. >> charlie: is there a strong nationalistic force that has potential in china to rise and make china something different than it is, something more

adventurous, something more aggressive, something that wants to take advantage of its power? >> there is a nationalist movement of a certain kind, and it's one i would say that's driven not by an ideologically aggressive impulse. there is nobody in china today saying we should be conducting ethnic cleansing in other countries. that's important to distinguish because you hear people particularly in southeast asia it feels to us like europe on the eve of world war ii where you have a powerful country claiming a larger share of terrorist, but i think it's important to draw distinctions. >> charlie: talking china or russia? >> exactly. and the chinese would say they have a lot of problems with what they've seen in crimea and ukraine. >> charlie: they love sovereignty. >> they do. >> charlie: there's also this in the economy, we saw it go from double digits to predictions of 7-plus percent. >> right. >> charlie: you read stories

of a possible real estate bust. >> right. >> charlie: how do you and they see it? >> they're very aware of the short-term problems and the long-term problems. you know, these days, i can tell you, over the course of the last couple of years, the story flipped. three years ago when i came home from beijing and would talk about the kinds of brewing trouble in the economy, most to have the time people would say that's a sideshow, not the issue. today the story has taken hold that the chinese economic miracle is kind of hitting the skids. neither caricature was completely correct. china does today still have this unusual i political arrangementn where it holds the reins over where money and credit goes. they have the power to rein in the shadow banks which represent a significant threat to the financial security of the country. if there is a country that can manage to get itself through this real estate boom without the kind of crisis that usually follows, it is china, but i

think we need to acclimate ourselves to the day -- you know, the days of 10% growth is over. >> charlie: had a nice run. they had a great run. >> charlie: the book is called "age of ambition: chasing fortune, truth and faith in the new china." back in a moment. stay with us. >> charlie: jojo i jo nesbo is , the country's first international pop cultural star, work belongs to scandinavian crime fiction. his series about detective harry hole ha has sold in many langua. his latest book is "the son." i am pleased to have jo nesbo at this table for the first time. welcome. so this is an incredible story of you, a guy who had been a rock star, a guy who's done so

many things and then you find this great, great career as a writer. does it surprise you? >> well, i think it surprised me when i, at the age of 37, i wrote my first novel, but it didn't surprise any of my friends or the people around me. >> charlie: why not? because they knew you had it in you? >> i think because i have been a storyteller since i was young. i would actually write the lyrics for my friends' bands and i would write short stories. i was of the generation that still wrote letters. >> charlie: so can you characterize -- are norwegian crime novels different? do they have their own identity? >> you know, i think it's hard for me as a norwegian to know. there is a scandinavian crime tradition that stems back to the

'70s where two swedish writers would write political crime, but more importantly they would write really good crime novels that would sort of take the crime novel into the serious book stores. that was when young, talented writers started using the crime novel as a vehicle for their storytelling talents, and it was -- it was probably more prestigious to write crime fiction in scandinavia during the '70s, '80s and '90s than it was in other countries in europe. and by the end of the '90s, there were so many scandinavian writers and norwegian writers that that's probably part of the reason why, right now,

scandinavia is experiencing this huge interest in not only the novels but, you know -- >> charlie: this opened up for you. that's a place i'm sure you're planting your flag. >> yeah, well, i think what's interesting in writing and storytelling now is the boundaries between the novel and the movie and the tv series are becoming more and more blurred. you know, you find there are so many crossovers. and i think a writer once said the novel can exist and have the right to exist only to the extent that the novel is doing what only the novel can do, which is, you know, i think is greatly put, but i disagree. i totally disagree. i think that what we see now is that novels are becoming more

like movies, movies are becoming more like novels, and you see the 100-hour story of the tv series is becoming the next big thing, and where we have probably the most cutting-edge storytelling right now, which is if you had said that to people ten years ago, they would not have believed you. >> charlie: do you think you can pretty much do anything you want to? i mean, your talent is multiple, beginning with writing, and if you can write and sing, you've got a career there. if you can write and you have an imagination, you have another career there. if you can write and have political opinions, you have another career there. it's a broad canvas you can pain pain -- paint on, to change my

metaphor. >> it's boils down to storytelling, as a journalist. you can use your storytelling abilities for so many things. you can be a politician, for example, being able to tell stories. and, yes, i think i can, but i also see the need to focus and i trust filmmakers who try to make the same movie over and over again. i think that you have to look for that one thing that can make a difference, that can, you know, survive the creator, and i think that's what i'm trying to do. >> charlie: tell me about "the son." >> "the son" started -- >> charlie: it's a revenge fantasy, isn't it? >> it definitely is. it started two years ago, and it started -- me and a friend, it was good friday, and we were

talking about jesus christ on the cross, and we were talking about the creed. i'm not sure how the creed reads in english, but directly translated from norwegian, the last part reads, "he is sitting by god the almighty's right hand, and from there he will come back to judge the living and the dead," which, you know, sounds like a tag line for a great movie. >> charlie: yes, it does, and probably is. >> it probably is and hopefully will be. and i was thinking that there's a story here. it's a story not only about this lonely, lonely guy who has taken on him to do time for all the

people's sins, in "the son"'s case two murders, but is also the revenge story, someone who is bound to come back, and that is exactly what "the son" is going to do in the book. >> charlie: when you look at what he decides to do, what did you want to create in him? what did you want us to think about him? >> i wanted to manipulate you into investing in him as a protagonist emotionally, and then make him do things that will make you question your own morale, what you yourself would have chosen, given the same

dilemmas. >> charlie: yeah, exactly. that is what -- i think that is what we're looking for in stories. it's whether the main character, the one we're rooting for will make the right moral choice, whether he is going to survive physically, whether he is going to solve the murder, that's interesting, too, but what we're really looking for is what is going to happen to his eternal soul -- is it going to heaven or to hell? and if you also can make the reader sort of discover at some time that you rooted for the wrong team, that you have been sort of part of the famous stand for the prison experiment where the people, you know, suddenly realizing that they were capable

of torturing the prisoners, normal people, that they were capable of evil. then i have at least for a short while put up a mirror. a reader said, are you sure that you are the right one to judge who is the hero? >> charlie: when you write a novel like this, "the son," are you thinking in your head a movie? >> i'm not, but then again i grew up in a generation that, although i have been writing books since i was real young, i've probably seen much more movies than i've read books so, inevitably, you will get influenced by the rhythm and the way the movie is constructed, the structure of the movie. so i do see that my stores

have -- stories have that rhythm to it. >> charlie: in the "new york times," an op-ed, you wrote "it is possible that yours truly is a deviant who ended up writing gory drive novels instead of what might be seen as the alternative, to everyone's benefit. it is also possible i am a pretty normal individual who enjoys these fantasies to savor the feeling of relief, catharsis and restored harmony a fitting revenge affords the average civilized person ." so which are you, or both? >> i think both, ultimately. >> charlie: it's nice to think of it that way, isn't it? >> yeah, well, the difficult thing about writing articles about your own viewpoints is

that the storyteller could become the story and, in my case and most writers' case, that's a boring story. so, you know, i like to just put out things and make the reader judge for themself. sometimes people will get provoked by the words i put in my character's mouth, but i like to -- i like to make heros that are, you know, unlikely heros and, you know, use story-telling techniques to make the bad guys the protagonist and vice versa.

it just makes for more interesting stories and for more interesting reading. >> charlie: norwegian prisons are probably unknown to americans who probably have put more people in prison than any other culture i know of, probably. are norwegian prisons different? more humane, more -- less punishing? >> they probably are. then again, i don't know american prisons in detail. for that sake, i know norwegian prince. >> charlie: how do you know norwegian prisons? >> i spent a little time in a norwegian prison, and the problem, "the son" -- warner

brothers bought the rights for the son and had some directors look at it. >> charlie: and the directors said what? >> the directors said the only problem with "the son" is that it use as norwegian prison, describes a norwegian prison. we don't have prisons like that in the united states. >> charlie: a country club? exactly. >> charlie: and, so, what is your idea of punishment? is it darker than your country? >> i'm not sure i have a clear idea of punishment. i think that's a difficult question to answer, what is punishment and what should punishment be. >> charlie: what is occupied about. >> occupied is a norwegia norwev

series. i had the idea for the tv series a long time ago, and the idea is what if we made a story where we could put some questions on the table. for example, what if norway, as a modern democracy, was occupied? and the occupier would allow us the same privileges that we've had for years -- like we could go to barcelona for a week for shopping, seemingly we would have the same tv programs, and we would have the same standard of living. if we could keep those things, what would we be willing to sacrifice for words like freedom and independence? what does that really mean, if it didn't mean anything

seemingly, you know, didn't mean anything in our everyday life? norway, of course, was occupied in the second world war by germany, and many of the heros in modern norwegian history is from the second world war. how would our generation act in the same situation? now, i did -- when i wrote the outline for the story, i had russia occupy norway. right now, that seems like, you know -- i didn't know that was going to happen in ukraine. >> charlie: what was your ambition? how do you see it connecting all the dots? >> i think, as a storyteller, my ambition is to, at some point,

be able to write something truly original, to say something that is true that hasn't been said before. of course, that is extremely ambitious, and i don't think i have been able to do that yet, but i have to keep that ambition, you know. i have to have something that will make me get up in the morning, and i think just doing that, just writing something that has a longer life than i have. >> charlie: nice to have you in new york. >> thank you. >> charlie: congratulations. jo nesbo. the book is called "the son." back in a moment. stay with us. >> charlie: fred krupp is here. 29 years, the president of the environmental defense fund. recently turned his focus to shell, becoming a centralized voice in the polarizing debate on fracking. the surge in natural gas and oil production in the last three

years has made u.s. the largest hydrocarbon producer. but fracking proposes risks to the environment. he and mike bloomberg wrote an april 29 "new york times" op-ed about fracking and in the may and june issue of foreign affairs magazine he writes an article entitled "don't just drill, baby, drill carefully." nice to have fred krupp back on the program. >> thanks, charlie. >> charlie: what is shale? shale is a formation of rock that years ago, a long time ago, trapped inside of it, in many cases, both oil and natural gas, depending on which shale formation, various ratios, and other hydrocarbons as well. for a long time, nobody knew how to get the fossil fuels out of it in an economic way, but over the last decade or so, people have figured out if you drill down and drill horizontal and crack it open, you can extract

the resource. >> charlie: so where is the debate? >> well, the the debate is over the fact that, while shell gas is a tremendous economic boon for the united states and has environmental benefits as well in that when natural gas is burned, it's a lot less sulfur, a lot less particulates and even half the carbon dioxide of burning coal, so despite -- >> charlie: one-half of the amount of co2 by burning coal? >> yes, when you burn natural gas. but despite the environmental and economic benefits including more jobs, lower prices for electricity for americans, a renaissance of manufacturing in this country, despite that, there are major problems, real problems and very legitimate concerns with the way we've gone about exploiting shale. >> charlie: what's the concern?

>> the concern is that it's been done, in some cases in a very sloppy way. it's contaminated water not from the fractures but from spills at the surface where chemicals get into people's aquifer and hundreds and even thousands of cases, or air pollution coming out of these wells that has sometimes made people sick. charlie, i was in washington county, pennsylvania, not long ago, and i met a woman who told me a story that she had been forced to move out of her farm. her son was living down the street safely away from the noxious fumes in order to get on his school bus. she was living temporarily out of her car. so there are real problems. i've seen them myself. >> charlie: but your argument, i assume, is those problems can be handled? >> yes, charlie, they can be handled.

unfortunately, many an industry stop there. because the fact they can in some alternate universe be handled doesn't mean we're handling them right. and because there are 6,000 operators, thousands of operators, it's going to take not a few operators doing thing right -- we have a few operators doing things right -- it's going to take laws and compliance with those laws in order to protect the neighbors and, by the way, protect the atmosphere because the fact that gas, when burned, emits half the carbon dioxide, isn't the end of the global warming story. it turns out, charlie, that even small amounts of methane -- methane is natural gas -- >> charlie: right. -- that leak into the atmosphere anywhere from the well to the burner tip, those undermine the carbon dioxide advantage because, charlie, methane is 84 times more potent

than carbon dioxide over the first 20 years it's released, and that means, to be better than coal, the grade has to be kept -- less than 2.5% of the product we get out of the ground, we have to keep the weep grade lower than that. >> charlie: are you trying to serve as a middle ground in this debate? >> no, charlie, i'm trying to advocate for the citizens that live around these wells and recognize that shale gas is a fact of life in america, it is being exploited, and we've got to protect people who live around it, their right to clean water and clean air, and we've got to protect the atmosphere. we have to harvest whatever climate advantage there is over coal by keeping the weep rate of methane down. >> charlie: some people like to say you're the one person in the environmental field that

sort of speaks to corporate america, that somehow you have a relationship with them and some influence with them. >> well, i think a lot of people in the environmental community speak to corporate america, not just me. i think what we recognize is that, you know, this is a fact of life and wishing it away isn't going to happen, even if, you know, we at the environmental defense fund very much are for rapid deployment of solar and wind power and those sources of energy have come way, way down in price, so we've got huge programs to push those truly clean energy sources out, pedal to the metal on renewables. >> charlie: yes. but at the same time, even if we stopped using natural gas as a fuel in america tomorrow, two-thirds of the natural gas we take out of the ground is being used in manufacturing, is being used to heat and cool homes and buildings. so it's important to clean it

up, even as we try to accelerate renewables and have fuller deployment. >> charlie: one guest after another comes to this table and talks about it. jessica matthews most recently, later last week, talking about indiana, has to do with tax on carbon. >> well, there's no question, charliish that the burning of fossil fuels has a lot of external costs and, until we put a price on carbon and a limit, a cap on the amount of these gases that go into the atmosphere -- >> charlie: was cap and trade good legislation? >> yes, the principle of capping emissions and letting entrepreneurs figure out how to meet those caps is a good prince the approximately. it worked really well with sulfur. but we can't be whetted to any

one particular approach. we need to figure out how to minimize gases. it turns out what most people don't know, charlie, is that, of the global warming being caused by today's emissions, half of that is being caused not by carbon dioxide but by the short-lived climate pollutants and, of that half, methane is two-thirds of that, the most important. so it turns out that, right now, we have a tremendous opportunity to take a bite out of america's footprint on global warming by reducing the emissions of this me than from oil and gas. >> charlie: and we do that by -- >> well, the governor of colorado is a real leader and he did it by saying the environmental defense fund, i want you to sit down at the table with the three largest developers of natural gas and oil in the state of colorado and

acanada and other energies and figure out -- >> charlie: were they able to do that? >> they were able to in a responsible way win back public confidence. we drafted the toughest air regulations in the country. >> charlie: they all said they could live with it? >> they all said they could live with it and turns out these regulations will take 200,000 tons of conventional air pollutants and methane, about 100,000 each, out of colorado's air. what does that mean? that's just a big number. it means the same thing as taking all the cars and trucks off the road in colorado. so the brown cloud denver had been doing such a good job minimizing has been growing with all the wells that they have been drilling and, now, it will shrink again, thanks to the new

regulation, and the methane emissions will be reduced by somewhere between a third and 40%. so that's how you do it. it turns out that methane emissions is one of the biggest global warming pollutants in america could be reduced according to a study by i.c.f. by 40% at a cost of just a penny per thousand feet of produced gas. >> charlie: weren't you asked to recommend how to make environmentally safe fracking? >> in 2011, and we issued a report on a safe path forward for natural gas, and there's been some progress but not enough. >> charlie: on a wholly different issue, do you support the keystone pipeline? >> no. >> charlie: you're with tom steiner on this? >> yes, and the rest of the

environmental community. it's a move backward to very carbon intensive fuel. i can't think of a worse way to make petroleum products. in america, thanks to fracking, we have more oil than refining capacity, so when it was originally contemplated, might have been a national security argument, that's no longer the case. >> charlie: so how do you assess president obama's environmental policies and not only what he's actually been able to achieve by executive order? >> well, the president's been a leader on climate change and i think is getting more and more focused on it. in the first term, he was able to double the miles per gallon standard for cars. that's one to have the big sources of greenhouse gases. now he's absolutely committed to issuing e.p.a. regulations on power plants, which is 40% of america's carbon pollution.

>> charlie: is there a race between finding alternative sources, being able to extract shale gas in a safe way, and the velocity of global warming? i mean, is there some kind of race between the ability to find that before global warming exercises a kind of really serious impact beyond where it is now? >> well, there is a race, a race against time to deploy the maximum solar, deploy maximum wind, energy efficiency. >> charlie: is anything holding bag the deployment of those two? >> yes, let's take, for example, florida. we have a company in this country -- more than one company -- that are putting solar panels on people's homes. the company pays for it. you get a contract to buy electricity for less than the utility would sell it to you. that business model is not allowed in florida. we need to clear away the thicket that is impeding the market. >> charlie: is it not cleared

away because the power of the energy companies lobbying? >> yes, that is a big reason. >> charlie: tell me how big the e.d.f. is now. >> last year we spent $120 million. we have 500 people deployed in america, but about 30 in beijing. if you're going to work on global warming, you have to have folks in china and we're working with the chinese government to clean up the air. >> charlie: someone the other day told me they had spoken to him or someone close to him. he said, one, i've got to clean up the air, corruption, and, three, i've got to get the economy on a sustainable footing by turning it from an export economy to a demand economy. pollution is right at the top. >> that's consistent from everything i know from our folks in beijing that the people and the government are serious in taking strong measures to clean

up the air, and i would not bet against them. when they set out to do something, the chinese government, they tend to get it done. >> charlie: because it's not a democracy? >> they meet their goals in the five-year plan, and they've set some strong goals on cleaning carbon and -- >> charlie: i think they tie the survivability of the party to that. >> you know, it's a political system, as an increasing number of americans want environmental cleanup, 85% of people under 30 want limits on carbon. >> charlie: so what's the problem? >> well, the politicians -- >> charlie: articulate the problem. >> i think the politicians have to catch one the people and i think they're going to do that in the united states just like -- >> charlie: do you think they'll do that in the 2014 elections? >> i think environmental issues are becoming an issue, more and more. >> charlie: yeah, but here's the point. the president campaigned for the environment.

he was an environmental campaign in 2008, and then cap and trade didn't pass. here's a guy who won with a significant victory and a democratic congress. >> it's true, the president, you know, had a priority of healthcare. >> charlie: right. i might have picked a different priority, but it took a long time to get that legislation passed. you know, we ran out of time, but in laws like the civil rights movement in the united states, there were a lot of different attempts to pass strong civil rights legislation in the -- and the first eight passed and these are things that take time, charlie. because we had one shot and didn't make it doesn't mean we won't in the future. we will because the future of our country and our economy depends on it. >> charlie: thank you for coming. pleasure to see you. >> thank you.

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