right now parts of northern new england are still dealing with the remnants of the latest massive winter storm which is crippled much of these coast this week dumping upwards of a foot or more of snow in major cities like philadelphia new york baltimore and washington along with the snow came freezing rain and sleet with iced over roads and power lines up and down the east coast as well as traffic nightmares from atlanta to boston meanwhile across the country the west coast is suffering from one of the worst droughts in recent history these severe weather events are stark reminder that we need to move away from the nineteenth century fossil fuels that are driving climate change and global warming and start using the clean and green energy alternatives that will secure and sure she's an energy secure america long

in the future it's a lot easier said than done so how do we get serious about fighting climate change and working for a more sustainable and environmentally friendly future joining me for tonight's conversations of great minds are evan whether co-founder of u.s. climate plan and angela anderson director of the climate and energy program with the union for kind of concerned scientists evan angela thank you for joining us to have you with us evan first of all the u.s. energy information administration. reported this week that the severe weather winter weather that we're seeing is actually threatening the east coast's ability to generate electricity at the same time in california water shortages are affecting that the ability to generate i mean we take a lot of water generate electricity if you're not doing it with solar panels or windmills. is this a piece of why combating climate change is important for energy. well. i

think as we move towards a more distributed energy system based on a nubile energies where communities are reducing their own power and we move to systems that use less water we're going to be much more secure in our energy g. infrastructure as well as the types of upgrades that we need to our electricity system to get us there will also help us to make us more resilient you know what is how do you define resilience what. question. well you know resilience really is about making sure that these severe weather events come and we know that as we keep pumping fossil fuels out into the atmosphere these severe weather events are going to become more severe and potentially in some cases more frequent as well resilience is about increasing our ability to deal with these types of weather events and the president has suggested a billion dollar climate resilience fund there's that word again this is a word that you were hearing even two or three years ago and now that we keep

getting knocked over and knocked over and knocked over whether superstorm sandy or mile wide tornado you know cold or whatever what does this mean or does what is it so that i think of resilience i think about the ability to bounce back and what the president's climate fund is really about is helping communities to prepare for these kinds of extreme weather events and they believe them to bounce back. by by being better prepared by having systems in place that help them recover faster and what might those systems be what specific do you have any sure it's really interesting for example a great example to get not drought but of the reverse actually in florida south florida were already feel arise as having really practical implications the city of miami is actually looking at ways to it's going to have to change its water drainage system because as. the sea level rise and the ground see it's actually

it's not raining down anymore and so the millions of dollars they're having to spend better system so that's just an example of coming up with infrastructure that is more resilient to the sorts of changes that will make but of course there's a limit to how resilient you can be and so that's why we have to you know worry about the root causes i'm reduced the risk of climate change as well but it develops when you travel in a gondola through the city and you're looking in the top of the window of what used to be the bottom floor of the building that the rest of it's now underwater and i realize that that was you know that was subtle and not so much about climate change but you know this amazingly the city survives you know and continues. we're pretty resilient species but it seems like that's not the smartest way to go about it you know it's in miami let's move the electric wires up to the top of the building so that you know when the water gets up to the ground floor well there's the hurricane

sandy showed us a lot of lessons like that for example folks had. a lot of backup generators to weather the storm but they were in the basement so they had actually been on the top floor they would have been much more useful at helping helping the communities prepare and survived the storm that's oddly the story to go right back up generators were very near the ocean at the lowest point in that part of the resilience fund is to invest in technologies and systems and pass that along to the community so they can be better prepared but of course we really have to begin asking the questions of who pays for that fund and how do we reduce the emissions that are actually causing the problems in the first place well who should pay for. everything so well i think she just laid it out the whoever is causing the problems in the first place as you said on your staff made it always we all have risk. well

it's ability but when it comes right down to it it is the fossil fuels that are causing the climate change and so we need to figure out how to make those industries pay for the damage that they're doing to our societies and figure out a way that we can all be responsible for our emissions it's called capturing extra calories and that's it if you're a god or you've got an industry that is producing and an external cost you know the whole game of business nowadays it seems as internalized profits externalized costs are losses they're the fossil fuel industry is dumping their trash in our backyard when we're having to deal with it is a carbon tax the best solution. you know putting a price on carbon really is the most important thing the exact mechanism you do it with you'll hear a lot of debate on both sides i think we believe that a carbon tax offers the best solution because of its inability to sort of be gamed by political systems you know in europe you have the emissions trading scheme there

and in a lot of ways that has really been sort of a failure with a carbon tax it's much more banks. exactly a carbon tax it's much more straightforward and it gives consumers and businesses clear strong pricing as holes signals showing them that they need to reduce their emissions and what they're going to pay if they have to do it. so. ireland has a carbon tax. the finland i think has a carbon tax there's several countries that have already put carbon taxes through us what has their experience been. well i think british columbia is a really good example they have a pretty modest carbon tax started out very low it's now up to thirty dollars per tonne but you know a lot of economists will say that needs to get higher and continues to need to increase but what you see in british columbia is not only have they been producing more emissions than the rest of canada as a whole over the period of the carbon tax has been in place but a. also their economy is doing just about as well or

a little bit better than the rest of canada as a whole while they're reducing their emissions so it really shows this is something that can be good for the economy good for businesses and good for their environment it's important thing i mean. yale project on climate change communication found that fifty five percent of republicans have a much larger percentage of democrats and opponents but five percent of republicans think that there should be a cost to carbon and regulation of car. how do we get passed. or what are your thoughts on how we're going to bring about this first of all assuming it's a necessary please speak to whether or not it's a necessary change and secondly how do we how do we do that in policy terms but definitely think changes is needed and i think it's a great sign. it's one of those many examples where people are way ahead of their

elected representatives for a way that happens all too often but i think what we're really trying to grapple with is. sort of it's time to get the debate back in congress the president is taking the lead where he can. reduce. he's got this greater fuel economy standards on. the e.p.a. is beginning to put limits on a mission limits on power plants which are one of the biggest sources of carbon in the country but all of those things have to come together and all of the emitters and all the people who are profiting from fossil fuels have to have to pay and we probably we have to accelerate what were the emission limits that we're putting on i think the way that you do that i think the preparedness discussion the president is starting is a way to tell everyone we have a stake in this and we can't solve the problem but we all have to contribute so that's consumers it's producers it's the guy. companies that are digging the call

out of the ground you know and it's not so hard to do for we've found i think there's a study last november that showed that two thirds of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today came from the extraction activities of nineteen entities exxon mobil shell chevron and addition to state owned companies in russia and china for in saudi arabia for example but essentially when you're looking at ninety entities plus the people who buy and burn that system it's pretty easy to say but they have some liability for the product for the problems their product is causing and just as we force other expect that other companies. assume liability for any damages their problems it's time for us to do the same and consumers in the end will of course participate in that solution so i think we're getting closer i think the more individuals realize that climate change is coming to their city and town that

there are mature and healthy clean energy alternatives then i think the congress will be less less afraid to take the issue on and. who knows what it will end up looking like sausage making is not pretty when it comes to those sorts of laws but i think that i'm hopeful that the time is coming because of polls like you just cited that congress will feel safer to take on the issue and when you say they have to pay it's not like i'm assuming that you don't mean that in the punitive sense you know you're going to pay for those and and you know it's really it's a matter of if they're producing twenty dollars worth of extra costs for every hundred or every thousand dollars worth of products that they produce that's what they should pay us we've solved problems like this before there's superfund sites for example there was a there was a fee that was embedded per ton just like you were talking about taking out the garbage the same thing happen. toxic waste and so there are and so the notion of

a carbon tax is really no different than that kind of imposition of a fee to be able to invest back into the economy to address the problems and reduce the risk it's just it's really a matter of. of recovering it's almost a matter of remediation of making whole the entire the entire system as. a certain level and i think a carbon tax provides the opportunity to make sure that the problem that we've seen so far doesn't continue to play out and what i mean by that is right now the people who are paying the cost of pollution are the people on the shorelines and the people that are suffering from drought in california and the people who are living in communities where natural gas fracking is wrecking their communities and their world are being poisoned or coal ash or in bangladesh where they're they're being you know this is more of tonight's conversations of the great minds of evan weber

and and landers.

i marinate join me on. that impartial and financial reporting commentary for news and much much. only on the best and only.

conversations with. evan webber co-founder of u.s. climate plan and angela anderson director of the climate energy program with the union of concerned scientists and let's get back to this. the energy transmission infrastructure of the united states was if not built certainly designed in the late nineteenth century early twentieth century. how do we move from one thousand eight hundred twentieth century energy infrastructure whether it be pipelines or trucks transporting gasoline or the electric grid is the obvious you know system to twenty first century energy systems to distribute energy

appropriately twenty first century it's a great question and i think in a lot of ways we already are i think the major question is will washington in our bureaucrats catch up with the change that's going under way right now. our energy infrastructure is democratizing in a way that's starting to make it look more like the internet which you talked about in your last segment like the monopolies that existed in the past century and with with these changes where communities are take control of their own power whether it's through wind farms or solar panels on homes and businesses not only are we becoming more efficient because transmission losses of going over a long area is are being being improved we're also becoming like we said before more resilient and able to deal with disruptions in transmission better. but in

a lot of ways we still need a lot to be done in order to get really bring the renewable energy that we want to see take over the energy system on the electric power research institute did a study that estimated that seventeen to. twenty four billion dollars would be needed annually over the next twenty years in order to really upgrade to the smart grid of the twenty first century but what's good about this is if we can find that money and we should be able to because really it's only what half a percent of the federal budget each year. we are not only going to make our communities more resilient but the same types of technologies will also allow more renewable energy to come online and so we're talking about things like demand response the a colder grid integration in improving the redundancies to make sure and making transmission lines be able to travel be able to push electricity faster from place to place one of the you mentioned three things what do those mean sure well demand

response is about recognizing when you have discrepancies in between where power is being produced and where it's needed and being able to use smart technologies of the twenty first century like the internet to be able to. shift the power and tell some consumers to turn off in other producers to turn on or could it be things like in norway are we actually there are several canaries in a system to this where at night when power electricity demand is low and they're generating power from hydro which just runs continuously they pump some of the water back up yet and then during the day they just that what what was a pump becomes a turban coming down and they generate you know twenty percent thirty percent more interest storage is another really big piece of this equation and it's one that in a lot of ways the answers have been around for a while the technologies are improving but the u.s. is really lagging behind angela one of the big issues seems to me.

that the problem that we have with these energy companies that are sitting on. trillions of dollars worth of carbon that is. we in the ground and aggressively spending i mean hundreds of millions of dollars to wabi to deny climate change to water for maintain subsidies whatever but mostly to make sure that they'll be able to get that out of the ground because if the day comes when everybody has to realize and this there was actually an article about this in the financial times about six months ago they called it the carbon bubble if the day comes when everybody realizes that you know b.p. or exxon mobil or fill in the blank is never actually going to be able to poll a certain percentage ten twenty thirty fifty percent of what they have on their balance sheet on their books they will never be able to pull it out of the ground or stop purse is going to collapse so i mean you know this kind of thing economists

have their hair on fire about but it would be a good thing it seems for our planet and that money presumably would just end up going someplace else to other. technology and it was what's. i'm sure you guys have thought about this a lot sure and there's a couple of things that are relevant i think one is that. has said we're going to stay below two degrees which is the to keep global average temperature rise under that limit and that that is sort of the safest most adaptable amount of global warming we can achieve. one hundred ninety countries including the united states have agreed to made a commitment to try to do that and i tells us that if we are going to do that most of those carbon reserves need to stay in the ground so for one that should be the signal right now that all of those companies need to begin diversifying their their businesses and you know b.p.

i think made for a few years ago and decided to jump into solar in a really really big way there's no reason that these companies certainly over time and right now given where. we are instead of investing their time and energy into stopping climate policies from coming into position bay could help shape them and they could begin as they think they are there's a lot there was another study also in the. new york times i think that showed that most of these companies are already figuring in a carbon price when they are doing their forecast profit and loss and business planning so they know this is coming exactly keeping it in the ground i think is going to be the it's going to be really really hard but we do have the time to begin putting in the policies in place now to give these companies plenty of time to diversify and begin investing in the kinds of things that don't cause the kinds

of problems and perhaps coming up with some really new solutions on burning them more cleanly do we really need to be all that worried about their their tender sensibilities i mean nobody nobody around to be mown the was the bug. actually. in its hundred and you know companies to know how to make money are good free market participants they will figure out another way to make money once and nine times out of ten with every other environmental problem as you mention as we talked about once they're told what the rules are what the limits are they figure out ways to comply and we just have to have to set rules evan to technology. germany which is the cloudiness country in europe. is that a latitude of michigan and its quality especially. germany is decided very going to solar as the country and fact we had one of the

two legislators on the program a couple years ago he's since died who introduced the legislation. they they did it without any government subsidy even i mean basically what they did is they backstop the banks to make mortgage loans to people who already own the whole homes to put a solar panel on their growth and then they backstop the energy companies they said the energy companies you're going to or maybe it's a national energy company i don't remember which but basically is that the cost of two nuclear power plants to two gigawatts where the power is x. and so for a ten year period that would be seven times whatever the cost of electricity is so when you buy back electricity off the solar system you're going to pay that for it and at the end the goal was at the end of ten years to have built out enough solar to be the equivalent of two nuclear power plants because that's what they were looking at having to build and they didn't want to have to do it at the end of ten years they had done more than ten nuclear power plants worth and they really had to basically stop the program because the grid couldn't handle it but it was localized

in the energy as well it's like you take a train across germany now east to west and so you're looking north at the southern . tops and what you see is every third house at the least you know in some communities every other house just covered with solar panels why don't we do in common sense stuff like this in the united states. well i think that's a question that we all find ourselves asking a lot but and is that a practical thing or did they just go off in some weird to well i think in a lot of ways germany does provide a very good example of what's possible a lot of people for many years have said we can't put. a certain amount of solar on a grid it'll ruin everything germany has time and time again year after year shown that that is just is not the case and now many states in the us are starting to catch up to that as our market matures there are some problems with the germany program while they didn't while they didn't provide massive that while they did

provide some subsidies let's start with that but also the feed in tariff program has made electricity. increase quite a bit for consumers and we know that's not something that's very popular but when we're talking about putting a price on the pollution the advantage is that we can take the revenue from from the price on the pollution that these big fossil fuel companies will have to pay and use that to make sure that american consumers do not get hit by the impacts of this policy. there's we are at exactly the same moment that germany was that we have over five hundred coal plants in this country that our research shows are fundamentally economic they can't compete either with natural gas or with alternatives like solar and wind so what is going to happen in the next two years as he puts these new standards in place for greenhouse gases they're going to have to take an alternative source of power it could be wind and solar we could have

exactly that kind of revolution and every single state is going to have to figure out how it's going to meet its demand as it uses less call and reduces greenhouse gas emissions so that opportunity is right in front of us over the course of the next two years and it can happen at the state level congress has a role but hopefully they will have to follow the way of really exciting. democratizing power activities that are happening at the state and local level i understand the minute we have left here understand that i was producing over twenty percent of their electricity from wind and texas just a little under twenty percent how does that happen. is that the t. boone pickens decided to do it or of the states push this or is it just exactly backed out he's all in for natural gas. most of bought for big for act. well there is a small program the production tax credit has been

a big help to the wind industry and there's. other tax credits that have helped with the those those instead. a fraction of what the fossil fuel industry has had over the years and continues to enjoy but those are essential policy pressures to put in place and technology is actually going to be i think the key and exactly the things that evan was talking about in terms of a grid that can actually handle the clean energy sources that are really a place to explode in and be a terrific source of energy for. evan thank you so much for being with us thank you to. everyone or angela anderson to see this and other conversations the great minds go to our website conversations of great minds dot com. and that's the way it is tonight friday february fourteenth two thousand and fourteen and don't forget democracy begins with you get out there get back to your.

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coming up on our team at the sochi winter olympic games heat up we'll have a report on today's winners and losers and excitement builds for a hockey showdown between russia and the u.s. the latest on events and sochi head. because of edward snowden the world now knows more about n.s.a. surveillance a former lawmaker has started a petition and his name that urges the u.s. to give snowden clemency a look at this petition coming up. and in connecticut many gun owners may be classified as a felons under a new law that requires gun owners to register their military style rifles but tens of thousands of owners are refusing to do so more on the second amendment showdown a later in the show.