Climate One

Jeremy Rifkin President, Foundation on Economic Trends; Author, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy and Changing the World The world is doomed to repeat four-year cycles of booms followed by crashes if we don’t get off oil, Jeremy Rifkin warns in this Climate One talk. The solution, what he calls the Third Industrial Revolution, is the “Energy Internet,” a nervous system linking millions of small renewable energy producers. For Rifkin, author of the new The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy and Changing the World, a seminal event occurred in July 2008, when the price of oil hit $147 a barrel. “Prices for everything on the supply chain went through the roof, from food to petrochemicals. Purchasing power plummeted all over the world that month. An entire economic engine of the Industrial Revolution shut down,” he says. “That was the great economic earthquake,” he goes on. “The collapse of the financial markets 60 days later was the aftershock. Our world leaders are still dealing with the aftershock, and have not gone to the nub of the crisis.” The reason this is happening now, Rifkin says, is that the “world is made out of and moved by fossil fuels.” “Every time we try to re-grow the economy at the same growth rate we were growing before July 2008, the price of oil goes up, all of the other prices goes up, purchasing power goes down, and it collapses.” This is a wall we can’t go beyond under the current energy regime, he says. “We’re in this wild gyration of four-year cycles, where we’re going to try to re-grow, collapse, re-grow, collapse.” The solution is a plan based on five pillars, which is being implemented in the European Union: 1) Renewable energy targets: such as the EU’s 20% by 2020 mandate 2) Green buildings: over the next 40 years, Europe plans to convert its 191 million buildings into energy-efficient, micro power plants 3) Energy storage: batteries, flywheels, and hydrogen used to smooth the intermittency of renewables 4) “Energy Internet”: create a central nervous system so that buildings can talk to the grid and sell or store power depending on prices 5) Plug-in electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. “This is power to the people,” he says. “This is the democratization of energy.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 3, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Big Green Michael Brune, Executive Director, Sierra Club Felicia Marcus, Western Director, Natural Resources Defense Council Karen Topakian, Board Chair, Greenpeace USA It would not seem a fruitful time to be on the frontlines in the fight to protect the environment in the United States, with the EPA under daily attack and climate legislation stalled. But the three environmental leaders participating in this Climate One panel note that many fronts exist outside of Washington, with at least one formidable adversary, utilities operating coal fired-power plants, forced to play defense. Until recently, says Michael Brune, Executive Director, Sierra Club, “every single conversation was about, Will we get 60 senators to pass comprehensive climate legislation – when that really represented just the tip of the iceberg, part of the conversation about climate change.” Brune and fellow panelists Felicia Marcus, Western Director, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Karen Topakian, Board Chair, Greenpeace USA, agree that D.C. politics will force environmental groups to play defense in the near term. They also stress that building grassroots support and presenting a positive vision of the future will be critical. “We’re trying to create a future in which we have clean energy, clean communities, and clean food. We have to deal not just with playing defense; we have to create a vision of the future that people are for,” says Marcus. Over the next three to five years, the Sierra Club will, as Brune puts it, focus on getting real and getting local. “It’s hard to motivate people around an issue where they get the moral imperative, but they don’t really understand what it is that you’re trying to do, and how your solutions will address the problems you’re identifying,” he says. For the Sierra Club, this means a return to its roots, a focus on the grassroots, says Brune, with the most visible manifestation of that effort its Beyond Coal campaign. Recently buttressed by a $50 million donation from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the campaign aims to force the retirement of one-third of the nation’s 600 coal-fired power plants over the next five years. Greenpeace likewise aims to retire old, dirty coal plants, says Karen Topakian. Its goal is 150 plants taken offline by 2015. “We’re making it tangible to people,” she says. “If you start talking about fuel in a way that’s abstract, people don’t get it.” “We are in alignment in fighting dirty fuels, and then creating an opening for clean fuels,” adds Felicia Marcus. “We’re at a place where we can use [clean energy] as a way to create and talk about a future that is at some level complex but at another much more clear to the average person.” For example, she says, NRDC is “doubling down” on an issue it has focused on for 30 years: “the very low-glamour, high-value issue of energy efficiency.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 28, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carbon & Courts II: Cap and Trade: Fixable or Fatally Flawed? Edie Chang, Office of Climate Change, California Air Resources Board Brent Newell, General Counsel, Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment Bill Gallegos, Executive Director, Communities for a Better Environment Kristin Eberhard, Legal Director, Western Energy and Climate Projects, Natural Resources Defense Council It might be the only reference to Star Wars you’ll ever hear at Climate One. Reaching for an analogy to drive home the impact of a shrinking cap on carbon emissions in California, Kristin Eberhard, Legal Director, Western Energy and Climate Projects, Natural Resources Defense Council, asks the audience to remember the trash compactor scene from the original Star Wars.“This is the cap for Chevron. That cap is coming down on them year after year after year. And they have to figure out what they’re going to do,” she says. “In the trash compactor, there’s no out. They’re in it. And that’s what we’re finding. These regulated facilities are realizing that the cap is not changing.”“The problem with Kristin’s analogy,” interjects Brent Newell, General Counsel, Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, to big laughs, “is that R2-D2 actually stopped the trash compactor. And they got out.” Replace R2-D2 in the analogy with political meddling and market manipulation and the two poles of this spirited Climate One exchange on the future of California’s cap-and-trade program come into focus. Eberhard and Edie Chang, Office of Climate Change, California Air Resources Board, argue that a regulated cap-and-trade system, coupled with renewable energy targets and improved fuel economy standards, will dramatically reduce carbon emissions and give communities relief from harmful localized pollutants. Newell and Bill Gallegos, Executive Director, Communities for a Better Environment, argue that regulators at CARB are choosing not to use their authority under AB 32 to target pollution at major industrial facilities, usually sited next to neighborhoods home to low-income people of color. After reiterating that environmental justice groups firmly support AB 32, Bill Gallegos says that the lawsuit these groups filed to force CARB to scrap the cap-and-trade system was a last resort. “We wanted to ensure that, as we’re reducing greenhouse gas emissions, let’s get the other stuff that is really choking people and killing them right now. We had a chance to do something good and, unfortunately, the Air Resources Board has not seized that opportunity,” he says. In response to Newell and Gallegos’ concern about local sources of pollutants, Edie Chang says, “We’re also initiating a rulemaking to ensure that the seventeen largest industrial sources in the state are going to have to implement the cost-effective greenhouse gas reductions. Programs like that will make sure that localized communities experience air-quality benefits.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 14, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carbon & Courts I: Atmospheric Trust Phil Gregory, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy Pete McCloskey, Former Congressman David Takacs, Associate Professor, UC Hastings College of the Law With climate legislation dead in Congress, and the international climate talks years from resolution, some proponents of climate action are turning to the courts in the hope that judges will compel governments to act. This Climate One panel brings together three attorneys who are pursuing climate action through a novel concept: atmospheric trust litigation. In May, Our Children’s Trust filed the first atmospheric trust suits, with young people named as the plaintiffs. The strategy couples lawsuits, which have now been filed in all 50 states and in federal courts, with the mobilization of youth. Phil Gregory, Principal Attorney, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy and co-counsel for the federal suits, explains the strategy. “You have to say to the courts, you, the judge, need to declare that there’s a problem here, and that the government, the sovereign, is not doing enough to protect the trust.” Gregory insists that that aim of the suits is not to turn judges into policymakers. “What we want the court to do is not itself institute a regulation, or not itself say, this is what you must do, this particular act, but you, the state agencies, you, the federal departments, need to come forward with a plan that works,” he says. David Takacs, Associate Professor, UC Hastings College of the Law, concedes that atmospheric trust is a novel application of the public trust doctrine. “Part of why the atmosphere has never been considered a public trust resource is because we’ve never had to think about climate change or the atmosphere as being a renewable resource,” he says. “Nonetheless,” he continues, “if you look at what the public trust doctrine actually says, the atmosphere is no different than those other resources [water, wildlife, and land] in terms of how fundamental it is to human life for present and future generations.” Retired California Congressman Pete McCloskey notes that these suits will require judges to make a leap. But judges have done so before in our history when politicians weren’t ready to act, he says, citing the Supreme Court’s role in desegregating schools. “Never trust the government to adhere to the doctrine of the public trust,” he says. “You’ve got to force them. It’s going to be the courts that take the lead. And it’s going to be the young people that force politicians to act.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 14, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior California reservoirs are at healthy levels this year, but the state’s water system remains in crisis. Projected changes in the Sierra snowpack and precipitation patterns, along with a growing population, present challenges for hydrating the state’s citizens and economy. How will the federal government help the state secure future water supplies by aiding ambitious projects such as the restoration of the California Bay Delta and the San Joaquin River? How will it keep rivers healthy and balance the water needs of humans and ecosystems? Prior to joining the Obama administration in 2009, Ken Salazar was a U.S. Senator from Colorado active on issues including renewable energy, food and fuel security, and the concerns of ranchers and rural Americans. Join us for a conversation with Secretary Salazar about fresh water, fishing and farming, and other resource concerns in California and the American West. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 19, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Humanity needs nature to thrive.” For Peter Seligmann, who delivers that line, and Jib Ellison, who shares the stage with him at this Climate One panel, the abundant services provided by nature too often go unrecognized. So what are those services?, asks Climate One’s Greg Dalton. In basic terms, replies Seligmann, CEO, Conservation International, ecosystem services are what we get from the natural world. He assigns those services to one of four categories: provisions – food, freshwater, and medicine; regulating – climate, flood control on coasts; supporting: the soil and nutrient cycles; and cultural – the places we live, the places that shape our belief systems. All of them are essential for people, he says, but “we’ve lost track of the relationship that we have with nature and ecosystem services because we don’t think about our foods coming from a forest or a farm; it comes from the supermarket. There’s a real disconnect now.”Jib Ellison, CEO, Blu Skye, a sustainability consultancy, emphasizes that business is just as indebted to the natural world. “If you think about all the goods and services that you can buy in a store, all of it ultimately is coming from somewhere down the line out of nature.” “The big companies in the world with visionary leaders are realizing,” he says, “that the security of supply to serve their customers is at risk.” The grave threat to natural systems around the globe has convinced both men of the need for environmentalists to preach beyond the converted, and to engage with business, including giants such as Wal-Mart. “What I’ve always felt,” Seligmann says, “is that if the environmental community focuses on the fifteen percent of the world that are true, ardent environmentalists we’re losing, losing, losing. We’ve got to make the tent big enough for everybody. Over time, that creates trust.” An absolutely critical element to get us there, says Ellison, is transparency on costs. “The sustainable economy is only going to come under one condition: When the lowest-priced good –the lowest-priced T-shirt at Wal-Mart – is lowest priced precisely because it does the least harm,” he says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this Climate One conversation, two of the most influential environmentalists of the past 30 years share the same stage for just the second time in their long careers in public life. Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and author of Eaarth, and Paul Hawken, entrepreneur and author of Blessed Unrest, talk about the ailing economy, the economy we must build to succeed it, and the forces that stand in the way. Climate One’s Greg Dalton opens by asking Hawken and McKibben how the United States ended up mired in recession. “We get into this predicament by artificially stimulating consumption for the past 40 years,” replies Hawken. The bursting of the credit bubble should tell us, he says, that consumerism, our longtime economic crutch, won’t get us out of this mess. McKibben agrees. Since the end of World War II he says, “the basic animating force of that economy was the task of building bigger houses farther apart from each other. It’s a project that ended up being environmentally ruinous, and socially ruinous, too.” And yet those ruins give us something to build upon. “The economy we’re moving towards looks less to growth than to durability and resilience and security. The trajectory will be more in the direction of local, instead of the ever-expanding outward globalism that’s relied on an endless supply of cheap fossil energy to make it possible.” “My only real worry,” he says, “is that climate change is happening so fast that it may knock the props out from under the whole thing before we can get to where we need to go.” The way forward is studded with challenges, Hawken says. First among them, the fear that individual actions won’t, by themselves, be enough. Small acts are rational and helpful, he says, but in the doing you don’t step back and ask: What do we really need to change? “What we need to change,” he answers, “is the system. And the system cannot change until there is a manifest crisis that is shared.” The problem, McKibben explains, is that the fossil fuel industry is actively working to block systemic change. “Most people understand that climate change is an incredibly serious problem about which we need to do something,” he says. “Our problem is far and away caused by the fact that the fossil fuel industry, which is the most profitable industry on Earth, has all of the financial means at their disposal to keep us from taking action.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 8, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Canada’s Oil Sands: Energy Security, or Energy Disaster? Cassie Doyle, Consul General, Canada; Former Canadian Deputy Minister of Natural Resources Jason Mark, Earth Island Institute Carl Pope, Chairman, The Sierra Club Alex Pourbaix, President of Energy and Oil Pipelines, TransCanada The 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline would carry heavy crude oil from Alberta to America’s Gulf Coast refineries. In this Climate One debate, a panel of experts argues for and against the controversial pipeline. For Alex Pourbaix, President of Energy and Oil Pipelines, TransCanada, the pipeline builder, and Cassie Doyle, Canada’s Consul General in San Francisco, the merits of the project are clear: America would bank a stable, secure supply of crude from a friendly neighbor. Why would the United States opt to buy crude from anyone other than Canada if given a choice?, asks Pourbaix. “To suggest that those other countries are more responsible environmental citizens than Canada begs comprehension. It is far more compelling to be getting your oil needs from Canada, rather than getting it from other countries such as Libya, Nigeria, or Venezuela,” he says. Cassie Doyle downplays the environmental impact of processing the Alberta oil sands’ heavy crude. “We assume that the oil sands production is static when it comes to environmental performance. When, since 1990, we’ve seen a 30% improvement in the carbon intensity per barrel.” Sierra Club Chairman Carl Pope and Jason Mark, Editor of the Earth Island Journal, dismiss both claims – that Keystone XL crude will stay in the United States and can be extracted without exacerbating climate change – as implausible. “This is really an export pipeline. It’s not really an import pipeline,” says Pope. “The United States is going to be used as a transit zone and a refining zone. We’re going to take the environmental risks.” Jason Mark faults the State Department environmental review for not acknowledging the pipeline’s contribution to climate change. “The U.S. State Department said that this pipeline would have ‘no significant environmental impact.’ As a journalist, that felt to me like the classic example of the headline writer not actually reading the story.” Mark highlights what is, to him, the even larger issue. “Is the United States going to be complicit in burning megatons more carbon dioxide that’s going to fuel run-away climate change?” We have a choice, he says, “Do we continue to make investments that leave us on the path of a carbon-intensive economy? Or, when do we make the hard decision that says we’re going to stop using oil?” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on August 30th, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Power Down The Rev. Canon Sally G. Bingham, President, The Regeneration Project Chris King, Chief Regulatory Officer, eMeter Gregory Walton, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Stanford University Energy underpins our civilization. It’s hardly surprising that convincing people to use less of something so tied to their comfort and survival is challenging. Smart policy has given California a head start, but it’s not enough. We need to dig deeper to reap energy savings, say these three experts convened by Climate One. “I think there’s a downside in focusing too narrowly on money,” says Gregory Walton, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Stanford University. Instead, Walton and his team focus on creating the sense that saving energy is a community movement. We need to reach a point where saving energy becomes the social norm, he says, as is the case with wearing seat belts and recycling. “There’s a psychological transformation that happens,” Walton says. “It’s the same behavior, the same experience, but it comes to feel very different by virtue of its social need.” There are still other levers to pull. “I have a bit of an advantage, in that most religions can use guilt,” jokes Rev. Sally G. Bingham, President and Founder, California Interfaith Power & Light. “Sometimes it works. But mostly our congregations that are cutting their energy use are doing it for the right reasons,” she says. “Fairly often a congregation will begin this process for money saving reasons, but also because they feel they are doing the right thing” Chris King, Chief Regulatory Officer, eMeter, says customers need better information. “There’s this strong desire for more information and ability to do something,” he says. “What they really want to know: How much energy does each of my appliances use?” It’s helpful to know that electricity consumption spiked when I plugged in my toaster, he says, but without comparing it to the total, the bigger picture is lost. A better solution is to give customers a monthly breakdown for electricity use by all appliances, which he says can be done with up to 90% accuracy using a combination of the smart meter and algorithms. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on July 22nd, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Senior Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council The fact that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is so readily embraced by progressives can conceal that his message is an inherently conservative one. Listen to Kennedy talk for an hour and you’ll hear the words “free market” invoked more often than in any Milton Friedman tome. “Show me a polluter, and I’ll show you a subsidy,” Kennedy is fond of saying, as he does here. The market is flawed, he says, by polluters who “make themselves rich by making everyone else poor” – externalizing their costs and internalizing the profits. Kennedy, Senior Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council, was in San Francisco to promote The Last Mountain, a new film that features his efforts to end mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. If dirty fuels were forced to cover their full costs, Kennedy says, not only could they not compete in the market, renewable energy would win. “Right now, we have a marketplace that is governed by rules that were written by the incumbents – coal, oil, and nukes – to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most destructive, most vindictive fuels from hell, rather than the cheap, clean, green, wholesome, safe, and patriotic fuels from heaven,” he says, to the loudest applause of the night. How did we get here? “Our democracy is broken,” Kennedy argues, with a campaign finance system “which is a system of legalized bribery.” And the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision will only hasten the decline. “The Citizens United case is the end of civilization, the end of democracy, with a 100-year-old law that said corporations cannot contribute to federal political candidates or officeholders. The Supreme Court just wiped that out, and we have a tsunami of corporate wealth that is now flooding into the political process.” Even so, Kennedy remains optimistic. “We built, in this country, more wind and solar last year than all the incumbents combined. That is a critical milestone in the adaptation of disruptive technologies,” he says. “Nobody notices it because the other one is so dominant in the market.” This is going to happen with clean energy, he says, not because government tells it to, but because the market is going to drive it there. “We can produce electric cars that cost six cents a mile to drive over the life of the car versus an internal combustion car that costs 60 cents. How long can they maintain that?” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on June 16, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices