sure be good for. good fortune may be the hope of those million maybe i'm very pro level so that means the wars that i've tried. giving you buddy or. a few of them are. for tonight's conversations with great minds i'm joined by one of our country's great environmental activists c.e.o. of the climate reality project climate reality action fund maggie fox maggie has been a leader in causes for progressive change for most of her life she's past national president of the america of america votes the former deputy deputy executive director of the sierra club and a consultant to the energy future coalition western resources advocates and the ocean conservancy bagus consulted with a number of organizations and foundations on their energy and climate campaigns including the hewlett foundation the un foundation the western conservation foundation and the better world fund you served in the boards of numerous

environmental and women's organizations and currently serves on the board of the green fund and was honored by the women's council on energy and the environment is that twenty ten woman of the year should be at began her career as a teacher and community organizer on the navajo and hopi reservations of arizona and new mexico and work for the colorado north carolina and northwest outward bound sure to be a university of north carolina a masters in education from the university of colorado and a j.d. with an emphasis in environmental law and native american natural resources law from northwestern school of law maggie cox welcome to the sort of great to have you with us leisure to be here and what a resume it's looks arctic yeah it well it and activist and passion obviously you've cared about what you've been doing from the get go on what got you started in activism in general and then we can talk about environmental a bit more philip was in college yes. really before that but i do. you know it was

activism i was very involved in my community growing up but i didn't the word activism wouldn't have been something i would have applied to it was really in college when i realized that speaking out was a honor and a privilege it pretty much never stopped work where was that i was in chapel hill. and so from there to climate actors well really from there to the navajo reservation rice nearly four and a half years and first. teaching as a way of learning about that culture i was fascinated and then i realized that. organizing was really a way of engagement that i found wonderful so there was a. in flagstaff in the same skopec sort of frame the town like steph arizona and picks were subject to an opportunity to create a new scary it which would really have changed the very nature of that now and the

culture around it and there were tons of community voices involved except for the two native american tribes for whom those mountains were sacred and i was living on the reservation when i was like wait a minute no no one is engaging them no one is even inviting them to this conversation and so i did and that began. that began my life really in my career vietnam was about learning about activism and on the reservation i actually became an activist and true since the word by tracking down riding around in a jeep with a navajo interpreter and a hopi interpreter. gauging people through a sound system like you use in a parade inviting them to join us for a public hearing i showed up after school at three thirty in the afternoon at the post office into the city mayor's own and there were nearly five hundred people there many of whom had written on the back of pickups or walked for most of the day and order to have a voice i thought there might be three. i had to go racing home trying to

find a way to get them to flagstaff which was ninety miles away found a school bus that didn't follow the rules because requisition to put people in. several school buses and trucked off to flex staff where they were so happy to see us. and pretty much haven't stopped since then. because that's part of it was a wonderful story and i can't really surprise but it taught me something really important which is when you ask people. give them a chance to speak and will always say yes it's true it's true it doesn't have to invite them and inform inform them and invite them and many taze you have to facilitate their participation because not everyone actually knows how to use their voice or where to go or how to get there or even that they can get through it involves the organizing piece which is informing inviting and then creating the opportunity so now you're involved with the with. the climate.

reality logic climate reality action fund right two pieces to the telescope well when i first joined the organization it was in two thousand and nine it was the alliance for climate education it was founded by vice president gore just after inconvenient truth and the i joined happily to help lead along with a number of other organizations the legislative campaign passed climate legislation after president obama was sworn in there was that moment in two thousand when really all of us believed it was possible. for the worst thirteen weeks where we had a filibuster proof senate until scott brown got sworn in and out of the whole world trade the economic downturn changed and the particular focus on health care or number of things that changed but copenhagen happened at the end of two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten so at the end of two thousand and ten when it was very clear that the opportunity. the legislative action. had drifted away from us.

and there wasn't a calendar in sight for it really is like when will we be able to rebuild this i think we sort of took a step back for five ten steps back and started thinking what is it that we need to do here to engage the voices of the american people one of the fundamental lessons of that period of introspection and thinking was that we've been focusing a huge amount over many years on climate science and on climate policy but we have actually been looking at the hayfields. and this global challenge climate change is something that is fairly predictable that we would have a difficult time if we don't as human beings do well with threats that are distant in time and location we respond to immediacy number one and in addition to that we even when you do accept the reality of climate change you actually often feel diminished by your own ability to make

a difference and so as we've thought through about advocacy and the need to give people an opportunity to engage to educate to inform and to invite we've really shifted our efforts to kind of create conversation. you can't solve a problem you can't talk about it and conversation about climate change has been treated like many other social issues that are pariahs like abortion is it cannot be discussed and they're not many dinner table conversations about it well and there are some very powerful forces who really don't want that conversation to happen. it's kind of a good news bad news story the bad news is that the old tobacco lobby and in many cases the exact same scientists funders have read it and in fact they started something called the tea party back in the day to as a smokers rights organization they re prized that and you know every single freshman republican member of congress. so there's no such thing as man made

climate change that's the bad news i guess the good news is that thirty years ago the most powerful lobby in this town here in washington d.c. it was the tobacco lobby and now they're a joke and you know so what i mean that flipped in large part because of a major lawsuit just walk everybody but what's it going to take to flip that dynamic so that when major national television networks in the united states i mean this isn't so much a problem the rest of the world when they cover climate change they feel obliged to say bar you know sort of oklahoma so as it's just about two thousand and twelve was the hottest year on record in the united states and the least amount of comic coverage to your show being a great exception yes but that's starting to change we were very frustrated by that reality and by the absence of an very aggressive standing up to denial and we created something called reality drop about a year ago which is literally taking all the climate myths and there are hundreds

and reducing them down to about one hundred and when scientists go after economists they tend to be fairly wordy and very precise and sometimes their explanation is three seven ten or twelve paragraphs and it's brilliant but it's not very accessible for people to have in the conversation so we went to work and took a common myths and actually reduce them to two sentences a simple conversational response without an attitude as i say to my wonderful solutions team no tude here are simply informing and engaging obviously when someone shares a mistruth you have to actually have a bottle and has to be done in a style that engages conversation sort of turns into a shouting match well one of things that's already happened now is popular science in the l.a. times i'm sure you've seen have decided they're not going to let a comment streams occur on climate change articles anymore because they were being used to mislead the content of the article. we're seeing the press change that one

of the things we have done the reason we went and created reality drop was because the there was a lot of data to show that the comments attached to articles were shaping the articles more than the actual articles were shaking the conversation so we can win this we can shut down denial it takes a concerted effort and a very specific strategy to stand up to it and every opportunity and a lot of what we're doing in our trainings is giving people the tools to stand up to denial both in personal conversations which take a certain delicacy sometimes with aunt or uncle and then more public conversations where you actually need to give people an opportunity to engage but not in a way that creates anger but actually it's the thinking you know i do see each. this isn't it's not the same anymore we don't need to create this we need to create curiosity yeah i agree you mention trainings on the bus and that's been such an exciting thing honestly told it's. like out of. so. i'll

actually started training people right away with a slideshow before and right after inconvenient truth and that program was called the climate project and i think the first one was in nashville there were fifty people sitting in the bar in a farming course it's actually carthage tennessee sitting on hay bales and the program continued and went global started doing trainings around the world and when i came right after the legislation did we merge the two organizations and i had a chance to really look at that separate organization and i saw the individuals that were eagerly signing up for these training it was like. this these people are extraordinary they are people who are already leaders. and they have chosen found this training somehow and chosen to come to really enhance their leadership and we. deep in their own commitment to working on people

like christiane if you get a susie executive secretary of the u.n. f.c.c. had chosen to come cameron diaz john doerr connor perkins i mean extraordinary people and not all by external enemy and they have to have a big name i mean people whose commitment to work on this is the sort that interests and spires used to be around so in the last year we've really expanded that training we did one in august of two thousand and twelve eight hundred people from over sixty countries and every state united states in the last year in twenty twelve retta twenty thirteen this year we actually did one in istanbul which was during. the civil unrest just happenstance and still we had people from over seventy countries places like iran and iraq and mongolia places where conflict is a way of life managed to make their way to istanbul to lead on climate change it's extra it was what you really extraordinary much of the conflict is now we're

learning being driven by things like droughts that will get into that what we can do about that more of tonight's conversations with great minds with maggie fox writer. dramas they're trying to be ignoring the. stories others refuse to notice. the faces changing the world lights in the. world. filled picture of today's news. from around the globe. look to. pick up i think. everybody thought of doing the show did you know the price is the only industry specifically measure. in the constitution and. that's because

a free and open press is critical to our democracy which i call brothers. in fact the single biggest threat facing our nation today is the call for the takeover of our government and across several that we've been a hydrogen right hand full of transnational corporations that will profit by destroying what our founding fathers but once i'm tom are going to get on this show we were to feel the big picture of what's actually going on in the world we go beyond identify them to try to fix a rational debate and a real discussion that critical issues facing america if i ever feel ready to join the movement then welcome it.

and welcome back to conversations with great minds i'm speaking with the c.e.o. of the climate reality project maggie fox and maggie we've we've covered the climate reality project to you and how we got to here where we go from here and we have the i.p.c.c. report just came out ninety five to one hundred percent certainty that you know human caused climate change is not only here and causing changes that are already measurable blood has some potentially really disastrous consequences a. b.

there's all these competing solutions. you just last week and i believe this thing called twenty four hours of reality the cost of carbon tell us about that or what is and you have a website cost of carbon what. just just reflects ok well first of all we started doing twenty four hours of reality three years ago after we really rebuilt and rebranded and really organized this endeavor and we did it as an invitation to join us in reality climate change is real that's first thing you have to get people to understand it's real and it's happening now it's human caused. and there's something you can do about it but conversation around the country isn't and around the world isn't that clear of the link between the changes people are experiencing caused by carbon pollution and the solution was putting a price on carbon. has actually been established and a lot of our work has been about that getting that into conversation in a simple way of speaking it doesn't take seventeen paragraphs either in science or

in policy so it actually has been established but it has missed i was of people's minds actually in that simple link we've known for a long time you and i i that carbon pollution is the problem but not everybody else can actually make that simple linkage so this year is twenty four hours of reality cost of carbon was really about establishing the fundamental truth that we're already paying the price of carbon pollution. right after the series that wonderful organization india looper produced a report that said in the united states we spend one hundred ten billion federal dollars on climate change events that's about three hundred dollars a person in tax dollars that doesn't account for all this time that state and region on this level around the country that isn't account for all the costs around the world so during twenty four hours rather we traveled around the world telling personal stories of people who had been impacted powerfully both financially in terms of their lives their livelihoods their health their entire. future based on

climate change either extreme weather events or sea level rise or any number of other impacts as we've done that was so exciting and over twenty one million viewers. and we ended up with two hundred fifty million facebook social media impressions and trending worldwide cost of carbon hash tag cost of course that message reached nearly forty two million people. what that says is that people are ready for conversation they were ready to understand that carbon pollution is is actually what's causing this challenge and that there is a simple solution put a price on carbon pollution. first in the fifty's in london based on the industrial revolution there was so much pollution as you see in beijing and around china today that you actually couldn't see six straight feet in front of you it was an extraordinary health hazard they put a price on pollution. and it changed we've done that in the united states with numerous pollutants but somehow based on the fossil fuel industry we haven't done

that we've been dumping ninety million tons of carbon pollution the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution and. no price well now we're living with that so what is the solution putting a price on carbon what does that mean it's simple vernacular but in terms of the policy approach it's literally feet it can be a tax it can be a fee it can be a combined version of a cap and trade there are suite of policy solutions and they will be and have been hotly debated but at the end of the day what is the solution not just in the united states but around the world put a price on carbon because it generates first of all you the fossil fuel industry actually has to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere they'll do that they will drive those budgets towards innovation instead of towards advertising to tell us that it's not happening or they've got our back when in fact those advertisements are spending more money on those than they are on there were noble energy r. and d. right. so there is a framework for

a solution. in some ways what we've done because of the complexity and fascination of changing to a car a low carbon economy we focused a lot on a different policy objectives without giving a simple frame to it at the end of the day whether is energy efficiency or renewable technologies or biofuels or whatever sweet appears before us we need a price on carbon to facilitate their intrude into the marketplace once that happens fossil fuels drive away and a clean energy a low carbon economy emerges so to to make this real for the average person watching. how much carbon is going through the average person's hands body car or house etc numbers what's the carbon footprint of the average american over the course of a year and at what point at what point and what price should we put on the well i think i don't exactly know what the price of the carbon footprint of each

individual is because it varies rather dramatically with what we do and where we live and how we live some of the worst impacts of climate change are occurring in countries in the world that have no carbon footprint. so when you think about carbon footprint i think it's less important to think about an individual's carbon footprint than our planetary carbon footprint and our country's carbon footprint. one of the reasons there's been such a difficult time reaching agreement globally is because the developing world is like look united states china india you are the problem and we haven't wanted to take that responsibility so i don't think focusing on an individual is the way to go i think it's actually focused on putting a price on that pollution to drive the solutions that we need which is to create a marketplace for those solutions but we're always trying to go without question is you mentioned earlier that the average american is paying three hundred dollars a year axis as the cost. the carbon is if if it worked out that we just raise the

cost of carbon by three hundred dollars per person would would that wash that out i mean is this the sort of thing that could be done in a way that's relatively easy it is it is actually it would in fact it should be painless because of the fees actually should be returned to the consumer right i mean the whole way of returning any kind of fee that's. extracted from the fossil fuel industry and all the different forms of fossil fuels coal oil natural gas etc should it return to the individual consumer because we are paying for it we're paying for it in taxes and in insurance and in lifestyle changes you know when you look at the droughts in the midwest over the last number of years it's not just continued years of losing crops ses at some point you stop being able to farm that land. and it's not just that it's been a tough few years it's an alteration of lifestyle what's the price of that how do

you repay that when there isn't a new clear future for someone who grew up in a farming community and can no longer raise crops because the land can't see that supported to me which is happening in some parts of the world if we look at a price of carbon at the point of origin for example the easiest easiest place to correct to tax you know one calls pulled out of the ground wells pumps natural gases extract. may arguably perhaps what they're doing in alaska is is a model for this they may tax their carbon industry the oil industry and sarah palin as governor was very enthusiastic about writing a two thousand dollars check every year to every man woman and child it was right. so what you know to kind of bend that carbon curve to to to make fossil fuel based carbon fuels more expensive than the more mature alternative energies in quotes right now solar wind. presumably in some places

geothermal or whatever what would be an appropriate price for carbon or i mean that's that's kind of a policy question and then and then the more practical question what is the actual price of you know what should what in terms of social and the you know the administration issues of social cost of carbon rule this year and it's a complex formula that i wouldn't even want individuals to try to put their bonds around because the game today there's not much there to understand except that trying to in a regulatory context the federal government is looking at what is the price that we actually need to add when you create a regulation that that accounts for that and it's a fairly complex formula but the bottom line is that we are already paying for it and there actually has to be a way of allocating it in the current price you know there's twenty dollars in one hundred dollars there's thirty dollars you know there are other countries in the world that are already pricing carbon in their variety of different methods for

doing it it's not clear what the price should be unless it right now but i would say starting as low as thirty dollars and moving it up to as high as one hundred to two hundred to three hundred is really where we must go to actually get a handle on this the refinement that needs to take place about what we're paying already. is is a necessary part of putting a price on and i think we'll end up starting with a lower price than we're actually already paying and this time goes by i begin to see that that price is a whole lot higher than we can actually politically move but if we can get started with even a thirty dollars fifty dollars hundred dollar price make it nor mr france in creating this low carbon future we absolutely must have to travel around the united states over a decade after the restart will be done for mark we're going for a house and we kept finding houses that were off the grid and you know. totally

soul or soul or some little bit of when they were all made in one hundred seventy nine or ninety eight because of policies that jimmy carter put in place president obama it's a pretty historic changes with a good alternative energies into the the reinvestment act was called the recovery and reinvestment act the stimulus. one of the policies that we need to be taking in addition to put a price on all really r. and d. research and development you know historically those who you know decry government has a way of getting things done together i think it's really foolish but some of the best innovation the world has occurred as a great result of government are indeed whether it's in the defense department or the department of energy most people don't really realize that some of the most innovative work on a clean energy future is occurring in the department of defense and we need a huge focus on research and development going forward because we not only have to reduce the carbon pollution we're dumping in the atmosphere we have to get the

carbon out of the atmosphere it that's already there it's there for hundreds of thousands of years and so we really need to look at a whole suite of you know research and development dollars. focused. on plants that's technologically a half minute or so of water is a technological have to know the geo engineering that is out there today looks pretty farfetched at this point but i think our indian monies and really putting that very focused look like we did when we went after going to the moon towards solving this it's an exciting twenty first century and that takes both getting the atmosphere clear of this pollution and putting research and development dollars megan fox thanks so much for you. to see this in other conversations the great minds go to our website conversations with great minds dot com. and that's the way it is tonight friday november fifteenth two thousand and thirteen and don't forget . mocker see begins with you get out there get active tag your.

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coming up on our teach change the channel worldwide demonstrations are planned for tomorrow to protest the mainstream media we'll talk to one of the event's organizers about why the mainstream media is bad news just ahead. plus the t.s.a. is getting its very own pat down and the new government the government report is critical of a t.s.a. program that's already cost taxpayers nearly one billion dollars take off your shoes because that's coming up. and on his eightieth birthday larry king is still going strong but what happens when he instead of asking the questions find out later in tonight's show.