birthrights special edition of conversations of great minds i'm speaking with someone who's been working in green development issues since the one nine hundred seventy s. he helped build america's first solar village bill bakker is the executive director of the presidential climate action project and a senior associate at natural capitalism solutions he spent fifteen years at the u.s. department of energy addition to his work at the climate action project he's also a member of. climate change task force and then advisor to the environmental and energy study institute here in washington d.c. william joins us now from denver colorado go back or welcome to the program. thank you very much glad to be here thanks for joining us let's start out with you what

got you interested in climate science sustainable. well you mentioned part of my resume goes back to the late one nine hundred seventy s. when i was a newspaper publisher in a small was town that was flooded every ten years or so with a major major flood like we've seen lately around here in colorado. for three and a half million dollars around this town. and i proposed in my capacity as we spend the money. for federal assistance again in the people this is after the oil embargoes of the one nine hundred seventy s. so we're doing it. and so basically we did seventy five percent or so of their heating energy comes from passive solar systems which is no mean feat of cold weather state likely to be very interested in community sustainability and alternative energy and those kinds of things while that's a remarkable story let's talk about solutions if you could. right the world's

policies we're going to start comes to confronting climate change. you know. i think i'd start where it's happening right now and that's what the community in the state level in some cases the regional level we've been disappointed by the international politicians and the national policy makers who have been able to resolve their differences about this in time is growing very very sure as you mentioned this is the biggest crisis that humanity and biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. interesting to me the first president of the united states where we heard about this problem was lyndon johnson in one nine hundred sixty five he was advised by is science adviser is that exactly what's happening now would happen and successive presidents and congresses have not really confronted this issue the way they should and in my view president obama is the last president with a chance to confront this problem in a way that they had off the worst of the of the damage and one of the solutions to

carbon change that's been proposed as a carbon tax what's your take on that. well i think what's at the root of the idea for a carbon tax and cap and trade which we heard about in two thousand and nine is the idea to begin pricing carbon and what that means is that right now we use an old math in our energy system where the cost of technology is really not reflected in the price we pay it doesn't count the people who get sick or the children who get as but in coal pollution it doesn't count the cost of defending the persian gulf oil fields it doesn't cost the cost of climate change and all the damages we're seeing manifest right now so what the government has to do i think is is to make cost equal price and the idea of a carbon tax is one way to do that it's a way to internalize what has been what they call the externalized cost so that the marketplace which is really really flawed can begin to give us good signals about what very. choices cost of the energy field and if we did that things like solar

wind geothermal would be sold far more cost effective and cost competitive than they are today so arguably you're making the conservative argument that the that a genuine free market in quotes should exist because right now the actual cost of carbon is not being paid by the people who are producing the carbon. yeah i don't think there can be such a thing or ever has been such a thing as a free market. but i think it could be a hell of a lot better than it is in bringing this pricing equation into balance using the new math where we caught the full life cycle costs of a choice or any other product for that matter is the way we need to fix the choices the american people make are there are other solutions for climate change that would suggest there's a zillion solutions. one of them is to. is the passive for example a national renewable energy portfolio standard which is something that president

obama's proposed that hasn't passed and that duplicate what thirty seven states in the united states now have done basically a requirement that a certain percentage of the electricity generated in that state come from renewable resources interestingly that is been a controversial policy there's been a movement to try to get those thirty seven states to repeal those laws. in the last legislative session earlier this year there were one hundred twenty six bills to modify these renewable energy portfolio standards and not one of them passed in fact four states created new standards so i think we're seeing at the state level the kind of action we need to. also through building codes at the state level through utility regulation through transportation planning many of the things that states and localities do that they have the power to make changes that will reduce carbon emissions and help us use leader energy. what do you what's your take. geo

engineering solutions sequester ation sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere . spraying titanium dioxide in the atmosphere to reflect the sun etc etc. well you know my thought is that you can't always count on good technologies to compensate for bad behavior. i'm kind of a skeptic on carbon capture and sequestration that stalled right now it's not progressing and what people don't pop about. the cost of of that that's added to our energy from coal when you try to sequester the carbon is the property rights issues and the liability issues in the. backyard my backyard issues that are going to pop up because we're talking about vast areas of land under which we would sequester the carbon terms of geo engineering those good sensible jew would be doing in silly do engineering the sensible kind is forestation reforestation for example we're planting things that actually sequester carbon or soil management in

a way that allows our soils which they want to do to sequester carbon but when you're talking about a scheme to deploy mirrors into space to reflect the sun or to see the oceans with iron not knowing what the consequences of that would be i think it's an exciting field for engineers but i don't think it's the way we did it we can go we shouldn't go we don't be doing the big consequences and if we've learned anything from climate change is that we really don't understand the natural systems we keep trying to manipulate so i don't think the solution is the manipulate the more i think it's to back up in the dristan that we depend on these natural systems especially the life support systems and we need to modify their behavior to collaborate with them and certainly not to destroy them can you dig a little deeper into that whole. carbon capture by biology system whether it's reforestation. stopping the deforestation particularly of our of our very very wild areas the rainfall. so why not and and the difference between.

soil that is that has been factory farmed heavily chemical ised and soil that is organically farmed that's that's rich in nutrients and apparently rich in carbon what tell us about this. well i think you hit at the you know the organically rich soils the healthy soils sequester more carbon than the ones that have been needed fertile with effect by monoculture and so on but also how we told the soils determines how well they keep that carbon within them so if we fill them frequently and disturb will tend to release. forestation is a well known way to the natural system to sequester carbon and other plant materials as well so as you know there's a big movement to the international level to save the rainforest for example to prevent them from being clear cut for farming or burnt down for farming and ranching. forest those are areas that have been so those are the natural ways to

collaborate with nature to do compensate for some of our energy use isn't one of the principal pressures that's a driving both deforestation and. high tech agriculture for lack of a better phrase population. i don't think is in question about that you know we've all heard about the food versus fuel controversy about whether growing crops to produce energy like corn or feed stocks that are a little bit more benign whether they still properly and result in the. hunger in higher food prices of there are ways i think to make those two goals compatible one of them is and i hope i'm answering your question here but one of them is the research very heavily right now is called cellulosic ethanol or cellulosic soils of ethanol where we're using corn stover crops on waste land in effect that can't be grown for food to produce ethanol. for transportation and other uses so there are

ways to do it with nine. uses of plant materials and in some cases we did leave where they are so they can sequester carbon it's always struck me. the way that the plants capture sunlight you know from from this giant fusion reactor ninety three million miles away is basically by looking at the sun and converting that that sunlight into three fourths of this is converting it into something that is store. in this case cellulose by and large. and that solar panels whether it's p. e. p.v. or whether it's you know using it for for heat like your village did back in the seventy's or basically doing the same thing plants do that scene strikes me as a member as a marketing message as a as a bumper sticker that could really really go viral and something that probably ninety five percent of people it's never occurred to them oh let's just imitate plants do what they do you know any thoughts on that a and on and b.

and how we're marketing alternative or or energy is in ways that may be more or less effective than for example that name. though your is a good very interesting question the my answer is going to. sound like earth speech or some such thing because basically we do need to mimic or or learn a lesson from the sun nurses plant materials and be a society that receives energy rather than captures it or digs it up from the ground it is been a very masculine energy. where we have sort of forced the energy out of the ground we've buried it we've dug we mined and so on when we have energy all around us that we simply need to learn to receive and it isn't a struggle to get it it's there and we've known this well before the industrial age we have better than that because technology is a lot is to forget about it and compensate technically for things that used to. we

used to get it so yeah there's a huge fundamental paradigm shift that used to happen in the world producing energy and it involves involves simply receiving. it's interesting you mention the ninety three million miles i'm always. amused by the argument that coal is going to be used inevitably because it's cheap and abundant but the cheapest abundant energy we have is ninety three million miles away it's delivered in eight minutes we've got a seven billion year supply of. carbon. i'm not sure why we don't think of it that way and it seems it seems so collins and so straightforward and like something that perhaps some sort of a political or ecological marketing campaign could be built more of conversations with great minds will back right after this break.

stories others refuse to see. faces changing. the picture. from around the globe.

i would put it. that i'm. trying to convey to. the bank. that. money and the. right. place. here is just two. days.

back to the special edition of conversations with great minds speaking william bakker director of the presidential climate action project. what are the biggest challenges in your mind in getting government and policy to align itself with something that's going to say people say save the world save our species. having been a bureaucrat for fifteen years. is that the. ship we hear about this image all the time but essentially we've got a government and the economy has been built for a carbon. and we need to rebuild government and rebuild the economy for carbon era carbon free so there's tremendous. need to be government operates the. biggest

barrier how in the sort of an institutional inertia issue but the biggest area is the barrier is money from fossil energy industries that want to defend their market share which i consider dead industries walking but they've got tremendous assets underground that they want to be able to mine and sell remind me to do to elaborate on that a few minutes but. about one hundred thirty one hundred sixty members of congress have received millions and millions of dollars this session from those corporate interests fossil fuel interests and the interesting thing to me tom is that the dichotomy the the gulf we see in washington about energy fossil versus renewable doesn't exist outside the beltway yale and george mason university did a couple of polls last april and one of them found that eighty six percent of the american people across party lines want renewable energy and they want a pretty quick they also did a poll just of republicans in republican leaning independents and they found that seventy seven percent of them want renewable energy and seventy percent of that

segment wants it immediately so i don't know if people think about themselves as lees leaves you know into photosynthesis process but they get it somehow maybe it's the energy independence angle you know the fact that there's it's there if self-sufficient i don't know but i think out here people get it in the president's challenge is the mobilize those opinion polls to turn them into votes and turn them into action of the community in the personal level and one of the things we're recommending to president obama and his administration right now to get outside the beltway mobilize the american people the president of the only elected official elected by all of the american people is responsible to all of us and so we're going to get out there and help rally the public to get behind and to vote in favor of renewable energy he said to remind you about those who want to bring out of the ground the resources that they fled claim to that they monetize at their balance sheets. we've recently seen science and bill mckibben who many of your listeners

and viewers know. it was the first to bring this to public attention but several years ago there was a scientific study with twenty or thirty if it was twenty six actually the world's top scientists and they determined that we have a carbon budget and that we we've used much of that budget up and in fact two thirds of the fossil energy proven reserves around the world have to stay underground we can't dig them up and still save ourselves from the worst consequences of climate change the international energy agency has confirmed that says the same thing that we have to leave those resources in the ground now those are assets trillions of dollars of assets that the possibility called in these used to evaluate their worth in the stock market and so on so the fact that we need to straddle them and leave them underground is not going over well in those industries but in fact if we want to head off the worst uncontrollable from climate change that's what we have to do shouldn't that also cause us to prioritize even if we

force their prioritization with tax policy for example. which of the fossil fuels we take out first i mean there's there's a whole lot of damage associated for example with cart tar sands oil all of the brothers apparently are going to make one hundred billion dollars just themselves to operate if the whole keystone x.l. for works vs there are other ways of of you know with some of the wider crudes and just natural gas although i suppose we could debate fracking all day long but. it's not a strong argument for prioritizing which of the fossil fuels we use and how and when and where it will absolutely is because some are dirtier than others coal being one of the dirtiest but. what we're getting the tar sands oil that people want to bring down from canada also is one of the filthiest energy intensive and water intensive forms of energy we do need to prioritize them and i think when the . wouldn't talks about that all all of the above energy policy is dead wrong it's

really a political play and we need a best of the above energy policy and we need to determine what's best by this full cost accounting where we evaluate the water consumption in the carbon emissions bedded energy in the energy product and so on to figure out the ones that have the most benefits at least cost them an environmental and an economic and social standpoint and if we do that it doesn't become a political question anymore it's almost formulated it's an empirical question of what most benefit society at least cost and in that proposition renewable energy and energy efficiency especially would win every time you said that eighty six percent of americans want renewable energies and i remember back in ninety eight that project for new american century published a rather famous paper in which they said they wanted to invade iraq and they wanted to get the oil for iraq and have a u.s. footprint right in the middle of the middle east and they said it would take a pro harbor like event to make that happen george bush clearly saw such an event

in nine eleven and used it leverage it to invade iraq. could it be that it's going to take some sort of pearl harbor you talked earlier about our economy you know the ship of state move slowly the but the ship of state did not move slowly in one thousand nine hundred two you know we mobilize really really rapidly after pearl harbor and we mobilized really really rapidly after nine eleven the defense budget right now is three times what it was in one thousand nine hundred seven is there is there a common pearl harbor event is it possible for us to take the next katrina and and. market is the wrong word but you know help people understand that the pearl harbor event is happening right now what are your thoughts at all. it's almost like a pearl harbor event with one japanese or craft of the time rather than the fleet of them going in and bombing pearl harbor it's a slow moving. crisis which is beginning to manifest in very visible ways it may be

that there will be a critical mass of these disasters that wake people up in where they mandate that the politicians deal with this and they begin to deal with it now and lives by the way or it may be something where it's the old frog in the blue gradually heated water image where it's happening so gradually that people don't really accept it as a crisis now what we need in you drew this analogy is a world war two type effort the danger is that where people get involved with victory gardens and all this kind of thing a lot of people talk about we need a moon shot all we have to do when president kennedy put that challenge before us is pay or taxes and watch t.v. we want something totally different than that where everybody's involved. but the danger with climate change what makes it a uniquely threatening problem is that by the time people understand it's a crisis they're willing to get rid of the devival change public policy pay

a little more for energy by the time that happens it may be too late when things get that bad it's likely the climate and climate change will beyond our ability to to affect it and control it so you know one of the things that we might talk about is whether we can prevent climate change we can't it's already happening and there is a great deal of damage already in the pipeline the question now is twofold whether we can reduce the amount of damage in the future and secondly how we adapt to were just to the damage that's already coming our way. to that point can you speak to the issue of tipping points what they are and which ones we know we've already passed which ones we might pass what the consequences of them will be when and where they might be happening in water the different areas where there are tipping points whether it's carbon dioxide or methane or other greenhouse gases etc. well i think the tipping points in my understanding involve. systems that suddenly

become self-perpetuating problems what they call positive feedback loops which is a kind of confusing term but the belting of the ice sheets is one of those certainly the warming in the calcification of the oceans i know you've talked about that is another one but tipping points are basically when we get to a point of no return and more than that a point where there's a feedback loop where nature is making the problem worse in the example we hear all the time on the ice sheet melting is that ice reflect sunlight prevents some of that global warming of the trapping of peak when it melts the ocean is much darker than it absorbs that heat and contributes to global warming so basically what's happening is that for one reason or another we're destroying systems that regulated the hospitality of this planet for the arts and we're changing all that right now and it could be quite a different planet the question is how far we're going to let that go. you started your career in journalism what's your assessment of how the media in the united states and around the world is dealing with climate change. you know well you know

the crazy thing of course it was drummed into me when i was a print journalist all about balanced reporting. what we need is proportionate reporting what happens is that there is a very small minority of of scientists who disagree with the ninety seven percent who say this is real this is human caused this is coming and the media or you know especially journalists i guess maybe broadcast to have decided that fairness is to give those people the very small minority equal time to the ninety seven percent and that creates the illusion that there is a real healthy debate here with half of the world leaving it half not and that's certainly not the case so what i'd love to see is proportionate reporting give that to the dissenters of the deniers there are three percent but make it out as it really is that ninety percent ninety seven percent i'm sorry of this climate science community absolutely concur that we have climate change it's real. it's.

the words human caused and it's underway right now seen a couple of major websites have now come out and said we're no longer giving space to climate deniers and we're considering climate denial commentaries as basically spam and we're just deleting them the los angeles times is probably the most famous of the mainstream media that's doing that. within the hour are we looking at the beginning of a trying to think. well i hope so it seems to be an ethical trend in terms of reporting. well good just a matter of practice i think the public used to get an accurate message not only about what's happening but the about what the experts tell us and by the way in a way feel compelled to tell you this but one of the things i think is the biggest waste of time is for those of us who are not scientists to argue about the side we need to leave the science to the scientists what we need to talk about is risk assessment at risk we're going to need to have a plan a change like

a risk issue the way we do when we buy auto insurance and health insurance we hope that that will never happen but it could and we protect ourselves against that from the government standpoint this is a risk management issue. and it's not a matter of scientific debate for us is for the scientists right so it's time for us to start attending to things like policy and you know what what we can do to really make this happen bill bakker it's been such a pleasure to have you with us tonight thank you so much for joining us my pleasure thank you very much. to see this and other conversations with great minds go to our website at conversations with grapevines dot com. and that's the way it is tonight wednesday december eighteenth twenty thirty and don't forget democracy begins when you get out there and get active tag you're safe.

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coming up on our t.v. journalist who helped reveal the expansion of n.s.a. surveillance testifies before the european union at a parliament committee glenn greenwald shared what he believes to be the n.s.a.'s ultimate goal we'll tell you what he said just ahead and senator john mccain goes rogue again overseas his trip to ukraine is the latest of the senator traveling the trouble nations to exert foreign influence on the maverick of his thirst for war coming up. a u.s. senator releases a report on wasteful federal spending the waste book two thousand and thirteen covers everything from military spending to tax breaks for brothels an in-depth look at government waste later in the show.