Climate One

Green Myths Busted Diana Donlon, Cool Foods Campaign Director, The Center For Food Safety David Friedman, Deputy Director, Union of Concerned Scientists Betsy Rosenberg, Radio Host, On The Green Front Concerned citizens who seek to reduce their individual impact on climate change are often misguided in their choices. Transportation? Household energy use? Food? Where can the individual make the greatest impact? Our panel of experts pokes holes in current myths and reveals how we can truly create change. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on May 21, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steve Coll: ExxonMobil and American Power Steve Coll, Author, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power; former Managing Editor, The Washington Post In Conversation with Greg Dalton, Climate One, The Commonwealth Club ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond said in 2000 that there was "no convincing scientific evidence" that carbon dioxide would disrupt the Earth's climate. Nine years later, CEO Rex Tillerson changed course and announced support for a carbon tax if it was revenue neutral and did not increase the size of government. ExxonMobil's maneuvers on pricing carbon are just one theme running through Steve Coll's book Private Empire. He writes that ExxonMobil spends more money lobbying Congress than any other corporation and in some countries its influence towers above the US Embassy. Within the energy industry, it is regarded as a highly efficient and profitable corporate machine with strong safety standards and relatively low rates of accidents and spills. Join us for the inside story of one of the world’s most secretive and powerful companies as told by a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on May 8, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Crash Course Chris Martenson, Ph.D., Futurist; Author, The Crash Course Tom Van Dyck, Senior Vice President, RBC Wealth Management In the midst of all the doom and gloom about the economy, where's the hope for building resilience back into family and community finances? Which personal choices will make a difference in regaining prosperity? Join two experts speaking about where we've been and where we're headed. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on April 24, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Power Poll Donnie Fowler, Clean Tech Strategist Loren Kaye, President, California Foundation for Commerce and Education Dave Metz, Pollster, FM3 "When Americans step into the voting booth, what influences their decisions on energy issues? Join us as we explore public attitudes underlying America’s energy future.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on April 19, 2012. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Covering Electric Cars Chelsea Sexton, EV expert featured in Who Killed the Electric Car? Katie Fehrenbacher, Senior Writer, GigaOM Ucilia Wang, Contributor, Forbes What's driving electric car sales? Who's buying, and which manufacturers understand how to market to these buyers? Does VC capital and government funding help or hinder progress? Listen in as three experts debate the issues. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on April 23, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Water World Laurent Auguste, CEO, Veolia Water Americas Jonas Minton, Water Policy Advisor, Planning and Conservation League Jason Morrison, Program Director, Pacific Institute Wild weather and growing population are increasing stress on global fresh water supplies. Scientists project more extremes of both too much and not enough water in some places and times. In the United States, aging infrastructure is in need of upgrade, but cash-strapped governments have little appetite for big-ticket items these days. And then there’s the need to adapt California’s water capture and storage systems to the climate-driven "new normal." Is there a global water crisis? What role should corporations and governments play in stewarding water resources in the American West and in a growing and thirsty world? Join us for a look into the future of the essence of life. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on March 29, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaking Youth to Power Abigail Borah, student, SustainUS.org Tania Pulido, Green For All Fellow; Brower Youth Award winner Adarsha Shivakumar, Stanford student, litigation plaintiff From courtrooms to diplomatic enclaves, youth advocates are clamoring to make their voices heard. Climate Progress dubbed 21-year-old college student Abigail Borah the “Durban Climate Hero” by for her appeal for faster action at a recent UN climate conference. Other advocates are filing suits claiming the U.S. and state governments have a legal responsibility to protect the atmosphere for future generations. Join us for a conversation with youth trying to build a cleaner future starting now. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on March 26, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Going Local Dan Rosen, Founder and CEO, Solar Mosaic Michael Shuman, Author, Local Dollars Local Sense Andrew Swallow, Founder, Mixt Greens; Author, Mixt Salads: A Chef's Bold Creations After decades of globalization there’s a new current pulling the other direction. Local food caught on and now people are thinking about buying other products from another county instead of another continent. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on March 23, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

GM CEO Dan Akerson Dan Akerson, Chairman and CEO, General Motors THaving posted the most profitable year in it history, General Motors seeks to drive technology toward a cleaner future. GM CEO, Dan Akerson says the “new GM” wants to be part of environmental solutions not the problem. He also talks about the Chevy Volt, climate-driven business risk, and funding of the controversial Heartland Institute. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on March 7, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Durban to Rio Tom Heller, Executive Director, Climate Policy Initiative; Professor, Stanford Law School Marc Stuart, Co-Founder, EcoSecurities Mark Schapiro, Senior Correspondent, Center for Investigative Reporting None of the experts gathered for this Climate One conversation expect much to come from the United Nations climate change negotiations.That’s not to say they think action has stalled. Rather, the panel, which included an international environmental lawyer, a clean energy investor, and a muckraking journalist, say to expect countries to continue investing in clean energy and carbon-cutting projects within their borders. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on February 29, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cruising 55 Shad Balch, Environment and Energy Communications, General Motors Roland Hwang, Director of Transportation Programs, NRDC Mary Nichols, Chair, California Air Resources Board Chris Paulson, VP of Strategy, Coda Automotive Have regulators, environmentalists, and automakers reached détente on the need to boost the fuel efficiency of America’s vehicle fleet? If one judges by the bonhomie displayed on stage by California’s top climate official, a transportation advocate, and two auto-industry executives during this Climate One panel, the answer is a resounding yes.The panel convened two weeks after the California Air Resources Board unanimously approved new rules that will require nearly 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles to be on the road by 2025. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on February 13, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Power Plays: Media Roundtable David Baker, Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle Dana Hull, Reporter, San Jose Mercury News Cassandra Sweet, Reporter, Dow Jones Clean energy has boomed in recent years, but to guarantee its continued growth investors need stable, long-term policy support, according to three of the Bay Area’s leading energy journalists.The panel also warns consumers to brace themselves for higher energy prices, predicting that California drivers could be paying $5 per gallon for gas as early as this summer. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on February 3, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sun Spots David Hayes, Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Interior John Laird, Secretary, California Resources Agency David Festa, West Coast Vice President, Environmental Defense Fund Michael Hatfield, Director of Development, First Solar Can large solar farms and the California desert co-exist? Yes, says this expert panel, which includes state and federal policymakers, California Resources Agency Secretary John Laird and Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes; an environmental advocate, David Festa, with the Environmental Defense Fund; and a project developer, Michael Hatfield, with First Solar. All agree that the Obama administration is on the right track with its commitment to bring relevant stakeholders together early in the process and in its preference for reviewing projects on a landscape scale. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on January 30, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2011 has been marked by extreme weather. In the U.S. alone, a record dozen disasters caused more than $1 billion in damage. This, and the release last month of a special UN report on extreme weather, was the backdrop for this Climate One panel featuring three leading climate scientists. Chris Field, Professor of Environmental Earth Sciences, Stanford University, is Co-Chair of the IPCC working group that produced the extreme weather report. He says the report reached three main conclusions: that extreme weather events are increasing; that losses are increasing; and that there’s a lot we can do about it: “smart things that don’t necessarily cost a lot that can be protective of assets and protective of lives.” What the extreme weather events tell us, says Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Princeton University, is that “the climate is changing, and we have to learn how to deal with that. The good news, as Chris said, is that there are a lot of specific examples where we have been successful. We’re falling behind right now. But, at certain places, at certain times, people have done a very good job.” One area acutely threatened by climate change is food production, where decades of steady gains could be reversed. Chris Field notes that global food production has increased by a predictable 1% to 2% per year over the past 50 years. But, he warns, “I see food security at the heart of a perfect storm.” One proven hedge against this uncertainty is resiliency, says Karen O'Brien, Professor of Sociology and Human Geology, University of Oslo. “A lot of people think of resilience as going back to what it was before, but it’s also about being adaptive, being able to deal with these changes that are coming in a way that has a short- and long-term perspective.” The reality of extreme weather is forcing impacted individuals – whatever their personal beliefs about climate change – to acknowledge that something is amiss. “What we hear a lot from farmers, for example, is that they don’t really think about climate change by reading headlines about climate change forecasts,” says Dave Friedberg, Founder and CEO, The Climate Corporation. “They think about climate change when they’ve had a significant loss two, three years in a row. I think the psychology of risk and the psychology of loss is such that you don’t necessarily think about it unless it is something you can relate to, or there’s an experience you’ve had associated with it.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on December 13, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication Dr. Richard Alley, Professor of Geosciences, Penn State The event is a moving tribute to the late Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider, as Richard Alley is honored as the inaugural winner of the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication. Alley, the Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, is also host of the PBS documentary "Earth: The Operators Manual." Alley and Climate One’s Greg Dalton talk about the challenges confronting scientists who carry on Schneider’s legacy of communicating climate science to the public and policymakers. The intent of the PBS series and companion book, Alley says, is to present both the risks and opportunities presented by climate change, and to use different messengers to tell the story. “We’re hoping to communicate more, not only the imperatives of doing something, but the amazing opportunities that are out there,” he says. The good news is that we have the tools we need to get started. “The first place to start is that we know we can get there without game-changers. This is the wonderful thing. If you can get a hundredth of a percent of the sun’s energy, that’s all of humanity’s energy. If you can put a wind farm on the windiest 20% of the plains and deserts of the world, that is far more than humanity’s energy needs.” And it helps if that message isn’t coming solely from him: “‘Climate change matters to you,’ I can say that. But why now have an admiral in the U.S. Navy say it, because climate change matters to them.” He also doesn’t want to prescribe policy solutions. “I would like very much to bring forward what we know, why it matters, and what opportunities are attached to that knowledge. And then stop and say, ‘It’s yours,’” he says. That handoff invariably involves asking policymakers, and the public, to grapple with the tricky concept of scientific uncertainty. Fortunately, Alley says, Stephen Schneider excelled at explaining uncertainty, using techniques that Alley has made his own. “You have to say: ‘This is what we know. And this is as good as it can get. And this is as bad as it can get.’ And make that very clear to people,” he says. And though his inbox is sometimes the target of skeptics’ screeds, Alley’s preferred response is to engage. “There may be bad people out there, but I don’t talk to them,” he says. “Even the ones who call me names, when you can actually sit down with them, they care. Usually they’re arguing about things that are not really what they care about. What they really care about are their grandkids.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California on December 6, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Boom or Bust? Dan Miller, Managing Director, The Roda Group Climate change “is going to dominate our world in the next century. It’s a very big risk, but it’s also a tremendous opportunity, if we make the right choices,” says Dan Miller. Miller, Managing Director at the venture capital firm The Roda Group, notes here that climate change is also treated much differently than other global threats. We spend billions on counterterrorism, to combat AIDS and other infectious diseases, to prevent a nuclear reactor meltdown, “but these kinds of risks have very low probabilities of actually affecting you. Yet we still worry about them a lot and are willing to take government action to combat them.” “Climate change, on the other hand, if we don’t address it, has the likely outcome that it will have catastrophic effects for nearly everyone,” he says. After reciting a depressing list of climate change impacts that are likely to or are already damaging the Earth’s natural systems – among them sea-level rise, drought, wildfires, melting permafrost, collapse of ice sheets , ocean acidification – Miller asks the salient question: “Why do we not act? Why, when we know the problem is huge, do we totally ignore it?” Evolutionary psychology offers some answers, he says. He identifies the factors working against action on climate change: CO2 and other planet-warming pollutants are invisible; the challenge is unprecedented; the causality is complex; the impacts are unpredictable and indirect; and all of us are complicit. Once one acknowledges the reality of climate change, there is a corresponding obligation to act, Miller says. He adds that individual action begins with asking our children for forgiveness, before moving on to reducing your carbon footprint, and believing, learning and engaging. What can countries do? Miller offers four recommendations: move to 100% carbon-free electricity in 10 to 20 years; keep tar sands and oil shale in the ground; expand R&D into geo-engineering, especially carbon capture and storage; and put a price on carbon. Miller’s preferred carbon-pricing vehicle is a so-called Clean Energy Dividend. A carbon fee would be added upstream, at the mine, power plant, refinery, or factory – enough to gradually raise the price of gasoline by $1 per gallon. Then, the federal government returns 100% of the proceeds on a per capita basis to citizens via a monthly check, with parents receiving one-half shares for up to two children.“That would drive a new economy of renewable energy and energy efficiency. I think most people would like it. I think conservatives would like it. It doesn’t raise any money for the government,” says Miller. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California on November 18, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sun Up Dan Shugar, CEO, Solaria Tom Dinwoodie, CTO, SunPower In the wake of the collapse of solar panel maker Solyndra, the solar industry has received front-page treatment for the first time. Unfortunately, most of the coverage has been negative and ill-informed. In danger of being lost, industry veterans Dan Shugar and Tom Dinwoodie tell this Climate One audience is the good news – that solar is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States. Dan Shugar, CEO, Solaria, offers a sense of the scale of the growth. “Solar is, for the last 10 years, the fastest-growing energy technology,” he says, recording 69% annually compounded growth, 10 years in a row. “Last year, our industry manufactured, shipped, and installed for homes, businesses, and power plants 17 gigawatts of power. That’s the daytime equivalent of what 17 nuclear power plants put out,” he says. Tom Dinwoodie, CTO, SunPower, adds that even assuming a slower annual growth rate, say 15%, solar could supply 100% of the United States’ electricity requirement by 2040. “In the last three years, if you just look at North America, there’s been three times more wind and solar installations, in megawatts installed, than coal,” says Dan Shugar. Dinwoodie and Shugar also address two recent events that have buffeted the industry – German firm SolarWorld’s WTO complaint alleging that Chinese state support has facilitated the flooding of the market with low-cost panels, and the bankruptcy of Solyndra. Yes, the SolarWorld dumping complaint has divided the industry, says Dinwoodie. But “you’ll see demand in the world pick up as a result of these low costs, and there will be more a supply-demand balance in the future.” Overlooked in media coverage of the issue, Dan Shugar adds, is that China maintains a 17% import duty on foreign panels. “We think having a conversation and trying to level the playing field would be the right way to go about equalizing that,” he says. On Solyndra, Dinwoodie says the firm “is basically a victim of the success of the solar industry.” Remember, adds Dan Shugar, that Solyndra’s loan guarantee, even at $535 million, represented just 2% of the Department of Energy loan guarantee portfolio. The real issue, he argues, is that “in a capital-starved economy, which is what we are now, it’s very difficult to get loans for proven manufacturing entities.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California on November 17, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Great Disruption Paul Gilding, Professor, Cambridge University Program for Sustainability Leadership Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute Growth as we’ve known it is over, say Paul Gilding and Richard Heinberg. “The idea that we can keep on growing the economy up against the physical limits of the Earth” – water, oil, and land – “is not physically possible,” says Gilding, author, The Great Disruption. “We’re in a trap really. If we grow the economy, then we’ll hit those limits again. Prices will go up. Oil prices will go up. Food prices will go up. And the economy will go down,” he says. “If we don’t grow the economy, we’re going to drown in debt. We’re going to take a while to find our way out of this morass that we’ve dug ourselves into.” Richard Heinberg, author, The End of Growth, has written that it took decades for nominal GDP to recover after the Great Depression. But the fallout of the Great Recession, he says, will be much worse. “I don’t think we’ll ever see growth the way we experienced during the decades of the 20th century.” “We have to create an economy that exists within nature’s limits,” he says. “We’ve been borrowing from the past, by way of fossil fuels. We’re also borrowing from future generations, by way of debt – all so that we can consumer as much as possible right now.” Gilding highlights one industry, solar, for which projections are increasingly optimistic. Globally, the industry is growing 40% each year, he notes, and every time the industry doubles, the price per watt falls by 20%. By 2020, he expects solar to be cheaper than coal. That’s not to say that energy incumbents will be easily swept aside. Oil firms are using every known trick, and developing more, to secure new deposits, Heinberg says: “We’re getting better and better at scraping the bottom of the barrel.”“They are fighting tooth and nail,” says Paul Gilding. “They are going to do whatever it takes to defend their cash. It’s up to government to overcome that, and to have the courage to stare them down and to enforce the change.” Such a stand is underway in Gilding’s native Australia, where parliament just passed legislation placing a price on carbon. Yes, the legislation is a compromise, with some carve-outs for energy-intensive industries, says Gilding, but “the key thing is that we’re going to cross that dreaded line that you haven’t crossed yet, which is that we’re saying nationally: you have to deal with the issue.” “I think our country has a larger capacity for denial,” says Richard Heinberg, an understatement that draws laughs. “I think we’re going to have to hit the wall before we see fundamental change.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San francisco on November 7, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Energy Innovation: Overhaul or Tweak? Severin Borenstein, Co-director, Energy Institute, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley Richard Lester, Director, MIT Industrial Performance Center Dan Reicher, Executive Director, Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, Stanford America’s innovation engine is the envy of the world, yet it struggles to deploy new technology at the scale commensurate with its economic might. This panel of experts from three of the nation’s leading universities says that the U.S. risks falling behind if it refuses to address the technical, financial, and political barriers slowing energy innovation. Richard Lester, Director, MIT Industrial Performance Center, lays out what he calls the three waves of energy innovation: energy efficiency in this decade; the scaling of low- or de-carbonized energy supply technologies beginning in 2020 and running through about 2050; and breakthroughs we don’t even know about today, or may know about but are in the lab stage, but that can take decades to mature. Dan Reicher, Executive Director, Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, Stanford University, is especially bullish on the promise of Lester’s first wave, energy efficiency. “It is the low-hanging fruit, and it’s also the low-hanging fruit that grows back. We don’t use it up,” he says. Reicher says that energy efficiency and other low-carbon technologies are needlessly held back because we ignore one or more critical criteria: technology, policy, and finance. And even when easy efficiency gains are there to be had, such as in new cars, says Severin Borenstein, Co-Director, Energy Institute, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, we are slow to act. “The technologies are getting better, but gasoline, for the most part, remains cheap. When you ask people how much they need to save to drive a smaller car, it’s a lot more than most people are willing to give up,” he says. These difficulties and more – think our broken political system – have convinced Richard Lester that a new approach, one not dependent upon raising the price of energy, is necessary. “It may be time for a shift in the policy debate to focus less on what is certainly the key requirement of increasing the price of energy to reflect these costs and focusing more on the other half of the equation, which is figuring out how to reduce the cost of the things that we actually want, which are low-carbon energy technologies and efficiency,” he says. Dan Reicher shares Lester’s concern about our broken politics, particularly as it is manifested in the GOP focus on the bankruptcy of Solyndra. “We may be demanding that anything that we put money into has got to show very reliable, very quick success. And not allow for what innovation requires, which is placing bets,” he says. Severin Borenstein urges policymakers to ramp up funding for basic science research, in part because he is pessimistic that existing renewable energy technologies will be sufficient. “The technologies that are going to solve this problem don’t exist yet,” he says, adding that “most of the technologies that exist don’t have the potential to be cost-effective with fossil fuels.” “We can’t take our eye off the price on carbon,” he says. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on November 3, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Executive Chairman, Ford Motor Co. It might sound strange coming from the scion of a family whose name is synonymous with cars, but Bill Ford is worried about a world with too many automobiles. “Even if we clean up our cars, 4 billion clean cars is still 4 billion cars,” he tells this Climate One audience. “Most everybody has been focused on CO2 and fossil fuels and the effect that has on us politically and environmentally. That’s absolutely an appropriate focus,” says William Clay Ford, Jr., Executive Chairman, Ford Motor Co. “But I have started to realize that there is this other looming issue lurking out there that nobody was focused on, and that’s what I started calling ‘global gridlock.’” In a world of 4 billion cars, “How are they going to move? How are we as mobility providers going to provide solutions, and not be part of the problem?,” he asks. His answer, to a large degree, is technology. Ford gives an example. His company is testing a fleet of demonstration vehicles outfitted with vehicle-to-vehicle information technology. Say you are about to enter an onramp for the freeway. Five miles ahead of you, another car rolls to a halt in stop-and-go traffic. You would receive an alert about the traffic jam and be given an alternate route to save time and prevent a larger back-up. Climate One’s Greg Dalton asks if Ford and other automakers feel threatened by the increasingly popular trend of urban car-sharing such as Zipcar. Without hesitating, Ford says: “I think it’s a great opportunity. People don’t have to own cars; they want to have access to cars.” Beyond giving customers access to mobility, Ford stresses his company’s commitment to changing the way cars are fueled. It is investing in R&D in compressed natural gas, hydrogen, fuel cells, and biofuels. But “we are making big bets on electric,” he says, with an all-electric Focus coming later this year and a plug-in model next year. Ford says that his company is also committed to improving the fuel economy of every model it makes. Four years ago, the company set a goal of being the fuel economy leader in every model category. Ford is investing in a suite of technologies, Bill Ford says, because “we really don’t know how the world is going to break out.” He adds: “Until this nation has an energy policy, which we desperately need, all of this is going to be sub-optimized.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 27, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

US Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) America should wean itself from foreign oil and invest in clean energy technologies and infrastructure. Join us for a broad conversation about what Congress could do to promote electric cars, create jobs and spur development of biofuels from forests and agricultural lands. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 26, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beyond Petroleum: Lessons from the Gulf of Mexico Bill Reilly, Co-Chair, National Oil Spill Commission Bob Graham, Co-Chair, National Oil Spill Commission More than a year after oil stopped gushing into the Gulf, the co-chairs of the commission tasked with investigating the Deepwater Horizon oil spill appear together in this Climate One panel to assess the nation’s response to the disaster. Bill Reilly and Bob Graham commend the Obama administration for overhauling regulation of the offshore oil industry, and praise the oil industry for initiating internal reforms, but they blast Congress for doing next to nothing to respond to the spill. Former EPA Administrator Bill Reilly says that the administration and the oil industry have heeded the call for reform. “The systemic reforms that we recommended are underway, certainly in the Interior Department under the direction of Michael Bromwich at BOEMRE and Secretary Salazar. They’ve issued any number of new rules on safety and environmental management that are long overdue, I think, and very defensible, very professional, and very appropriate.” Less expected has been the aggressive push by the oil industry to take control of its own conduct. “Very promising, and to some extent surprising, has been the response of industry,” says Reilly. “Frankly, industry has done more than Congress to respond to our report,” he says. Asked by Climate One’s Greg Dalton to grade the government and industry implementation of commission’s report, former U.S. Senator Bob Graham says: “Probably, in both places, it would be ‘incomplete.’ The actions that have been taken at the executive level in the federal government are very encouraging.” As for Congress, Graham is less than impressed. “The Congress would not get a very good grade because they have essentially done nothing, and in some instances have gone backward.” Reilly and Graham express frustration that the five Gulf states have been unable to reach agreement to settle monetary damages and fund restoration. “We’re still waiting to see what the final settlement looks like, where the money goes,” says Reilly, but “one hopes it goes to restoration when it’s finally allocated.” Graham and Reilly also want money dedicated to monitoring potential health impacts of the spill for residents and those who consume Gulf seafood. “To fully assess the health implications of this event, and the environmental implications, we’re going to require an extended period of time and a substantial investment in research,” Graham says. Graham and Reilly also agreed that we need to reduce the demand for oil – and hence the need for more drilling – altogether. “I don’t see the United States engaged in any serious thinking about what its economy is going to be in the post-oil era,” Graham says.This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 21, 2011 This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 21, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beyond Petroleum: Navy Seals Leading the Charge Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Energy & Installations Jeremy Carl, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University The U.S. military has ambitious plans to reduce its dangerous dependence on oil and other fossil fuels. Can the buying power of the Pentagon drive innovation in new energy technologies and create markets? This conversation explores how the U.S. Navy and other military branches can align their intellectual and financial capital to accelerate and broaden the transition to cleaner sources of electricity and transportation fuels for American forces and the American economy. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 21, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saltworks and Beyond Peter Calthorpe, Principal Architect, Peter Calthorpe Associates David Lewis, Executive Director, Save the Bay Jack Matthews, Mayor, San Mateo The debate over Saltworks, a proposal to build 12,000 homes on former salt ponds in Redwood City, is a harbinger of coming development fights in the age of climate change. In this October 18 Climate One debate, architect Peter Calthorpe argues that the need for housing in the San Francisco Bay Area is so great that infill development alone can’t meet demand; conservationist David Lewis counters that developing one of the region’s last unprotected wetlands is not worth the cost. “This is not a site for housing,” says Lewis, Executive Director, Save the Bay. “This one area in Redwood City was held onto by the Cargill Salt Company because they wanted to develop it,” he says. “They have no entitlement to develop it. The city’s general plan says it should remain as open space. It’s a priority area for acquisition by the federal wildlife refuge.” “I do have some concerns about it,” says Jack Matthews, He concedes that the development, as planned, seems isolated. Peter Calthorpe, Principal Architect, Calthorpe Associates, argues that Saltworks needs to be assessed not as a stand-alone development project but as a response to regional pressures. “The larger context is that for a very long time we’ve been building more jobs than housing—particularly in the west side of the Bay, in Silicon Valley and the Peninsula. The jobs housing balance has been so askew that we have people commuting from outside the nine-county Bay Area. We’ve been pushing housing way to the periphery.” Citing the Association of Bay Area Governments, Calthorpe says the region will need 72,000 new housing units to keep up with expected demand. There is no way to satisfy demand by only building transit-oriented development along El Camino Real, the region’s main north-south artery, he says. Calthorpe challenges David Lewis to answer how the region can reach a jobs-housing balance without employees moving to sprawling developments in Tracy or Livermore or Gilroy, if projects such as Saltworks aren’t built. “When you push housing farther and farther to the periphery because you don’t want to face up to the challenge in these jobs-rich areas, the environmental footprint, carbon emissions, VMT [vehicle miles traveled], energy consumption, and land consumption—because we all know it’s lower density once it gets out there – all of that, in many cases, is on pristine habitat or farmland.”We do it by building on already developed land and re-configuring our cities, Lewis answers. Saltworks “should have been dead on arrival in the beginning because it’s not the right place,” he says. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 18, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World Daniel Yergin, Executive Vice President and Chairman, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; CNBC Global Energy Expert; Author, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World Bullish on technology’s ability to tap previously unreachable oil and gas, energy analyst Daniel Yergin tells this Climate One audience to expect the age of fossil fuels to continue well into this century. Yergin is author of The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil age The Prize. A pivotal year for Yergin is 2004 when, he says, the world woke up to the surge in energy demand in emerging markets, notably China. After Yergin’s opening remarks, Climate One’s Greg Dalton reads a 2010 statement from International Energy Agency Chief Economist Fatih Birol expressing concern over rising global oil demand and urging a transition from oil. Yes, the statement was reasonable, Yergin says, we will run out of oil someday. But “we’ve run out of oil – and I don’t say this facetiously – five times.” Referring to the oil shocks of the 1970s, Yergin says, “There are people in this room who know very well that we were going to fall off the oil mountain – and production is now up 30%. We haven’t used up half the world’s oil; we’ve maybe used up 20% of the world’s oil.” Keeping up with demand isn’t just about making new discoveries, Yergin says. Also important are extensions and additions to existing oil fields, prolonging the life of oil plays thought to be exhausted. “It’s technology,” he says. “There’s a tendency to think that technology stagnates, that where you are is where you are going to be. But, in fact, the industry is basically run by scientists and engineers who are trying to push the technology along.” During the audience Q&A, Yergin is asked if he agrees fossil fuel subsidies needed to be reduced to level the playing field for renewables entering the market. “The subsidies question is very complex, and it really depends upon definition,” he says. Jobs are being created in the renewable industry, he says, “but I think the thing we’ll probably see in the next month or so is the fact that in the last three or four years – and this seems counterintuitive – a lot more jobs have actually been created in the conventional energy industry than in the green industry. That doesn’t mean that’s going to be the case five years or 10 years from now when those industries are much more mature.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 13, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Red Alert: China Time, China Scale Peter Greenwood, Executive Director of Strategy, China Light and Power Group Stephen Leeb, Co-author, Red Alert Alex Wang, Visiting Professor, UC Berkeley School of Law Julian Wong, Attorney, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati; Former Advisor, U.S. Department of Energy The four China watchers assembled for this Climate One panel debate the motives for, and the implications of, China’s domestic climate action, particularly its abundant clean energy investments. Stephen Leeb, co-author, Red Alert, is the panel’s contrarian. “I don’t think China does anything with the world’s interest at hand; I think they do everything with China’s interest at hand. Climate change is very much a mixed bag for them. Much more important to them is the issue of resource scarcity.” Leeb was suspicious of the intent of China’s renewable energy investments. China, he says, aims to control the solar market to the detriment of foreign players, including the United States. Julian Wong, an attorney with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, agrees with Leeb, up to a point. Yes, energy is a pivotal issue in China’s economic growth, he says, and scarcity issues are “high in the minds of China’s leaders.” He also cites the increasing importance of environmental protection in preventing unrest. “Ultimately, this Communist Party is in power as long as the people allow it to be. If you are getting protests by citizens, by residents, on very fundamental needs, that’s going to get the attention of leaders.” Alex Wang, a visiting professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law, emphasizes the importance of the environmental protest movement, citing events this summer at a chemical plant in the city of Dalian and at facilities operated by Jinko Solar. “People are getting more wealthy. They are getting better educated about environmental issues, and they realize that is impacting their health, their children’s health,” he says. Counter to Stephen Leeb, Peter Greenwood, Executive Director of Strategy, China Light and Power Group, says we should vaunt not vilify China’s investments in wind and solar. “It’s not actually, necessarily, a bad story for the rest of the world. Wind turbine prices have fallen in the last couple of years by about 20%. A lot of that is due to the efficiency and scale of Chinese manufacturing,” he says. “What does that do? It means that wind projects that were previously uneconomical become economical. Sites that were previously not feasible become feasible. Subsidies that might otherwise have to be paid by Western and other governments can perhaps operate at lower levels. That’s a beneficial story.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 12, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drop In, Scale Up? Ed Dineen, CEO, LS9 Alan Shaw, CEO, Codexis Jonathan Wolfson, CEO, Solazyme Next-generation biofuels are on the verge of a breakthrough but aren’t ready to displace conventional fuels, three Bay Area biofuel company CEOs say in this Climate One talk. The CEOs insist that their fuels must compete on price with conventional gasoline or diesel, with or without government support, or a price on carbon, which means they have to scale up, fast. For biofuels to scale, all agree, they must be drop-in fuels. Meaning, says Jonathan Wolfson, CEO, Solazyme, “a fuel that fits directly into the existing infrastructure without modification.” “You’ll not replace mass transportation, internal combustion engines, in our lifetime – not at mass scale,” says Alan Shaw, CEO, Codexis. “What drives it is a liquid transportation fuel. We need an alternative to that. We’re still in the very early days. And that’s because the technology is not ready to be deployed at scale.” Ed Dineen, CEO, LS9, says “for the type of technologies we’re practicing” – second-generation biofuels – “I think three years you’ll start to see plants be established. And once the initial plants get established, and we learn the technology, the acceleration will pick up,” he says. “The bigger issue is the capital intensity of these plants,” he adds. “If we see a world of $150 [per barrel] crude, I think that’s going to accelerate the pace of this technology,” he says. Agreeing with Jonathan Wolfson, Shaw says that “the key driver of economics here is feedstock costs” – in this case, sugars. Promisingly, he says, the second-generation cellulosic sugars that he and fellow panelists’ are developing run about a tenth the cost of their first-generation predecessors. The larger price competition, biofuels pitted against conventional crude, would be a fairer one, Wolfson says, if the two sides were evenly matched. “There is one thing people forget, which is that the big integrated oil companies have had 100 years to bury subsidies in all kinds of places. People are talking about Industry should stand up, and We should all be dependent on alternative and renewable fuels meeting parity with petroleum. But the truth is parity isn’t parity because of all these hidden subsidies.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 6, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Truckin' John Boesel, CEO, CALSTART Mike Tunnell, Director, Environmental Affairs, American Trucking Associations Alan Niedzwiecki, CEO, Quantum Technologies In August, the Obama administration announced the first-ever fuel efficiency standards for heavy-duty trucks and buses. The three experts convened at this Climate One panel say that the trucking industry is ready to meet the new rules, which require semi-trucks to reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2018. “What’s exciting now is that we have some decent public policy in place,” says John Boesel, CEO, CALSTART. “The engineering talent that was dedicated to cleaning up the criteria emissions is going to be applied to helping reduce our dependence on oil and cut greenhouse gas emissions. I think we’re going to see a lot of innovation in this space.” The new rules “will encourage fleets over this short term to develop best-available technology that is there today. It won’t really be technology forcing,” he says. At the same time, he adds, fleets will be looking at alternative fuels, especially natural gas, when they make economic sense. Mike Tunnell, Director of Environmental Affairs, American Trucking Associations, agrees, pointing out that with diesel prices hovering in $3 to $4 gallon range, “fleets are beginning to look more, in America, at alternative fuels and natural gas in an effort to cut some of the fuel costs.” But, he cautions, there is a flip side: the upfront costs for equipment are higher, and fuel availability becomes a concern. Climate One’s Greg Dalton picks up on the supply worries later, asking if fleet operators are concerned energy firms might not meet California’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, which aims to reduce the carbon intensity of California’s transportation fuels by 10% by 2020. “There will be some concerns,” says John Boesel, “but this is a regulation that will encourage them to be more innovative and more creative than they have been in the past.” David Mazaika, Chief Operating Officer, Quantum Technologies, says that plenty of examples, including hybrid buses now in service, prove that the fuel standards can be met. “It certainly can be done; the industry just needs to focus on that. Now, with the new legislation, there are some targets out there that the industry can focus on and really strive to meet.” “The technology is out there to be able to support these types of levels,” he says. “It will be a wide spectrum – everything from aerodynamic improvements to hybrid-drive systems and different fuels.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 5, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Crops, Cattle and Carbon Cynthia Cory, Director of Environmental Affairs, California Farm Bureau Federation Paul Martin, Director of Environmental Services, Western United Dairymen Jeanne Merrill, California Climate Action Network Karen Ross, Secretary, California Department of Food and Agriculture Making California’s farms more energy efficient, and ensuring that farmers can adapt to a warmer planet, will be a decades-long challenge, agrees this panel of experts gathered by Climate One. That a serious conversation on the linkages between agriculture and climate change even exists in California is largely thanks to passage of the state’s landmark climate change law, AB32. Cynthia Cory, Director of Environmental Affairs, California Farm Bureau Federation, says the way to sell this new reality to her members, most of them family farmers, is to focus on the bottom line. “What they think makes sense, is energy efficiency,” she says. Jeanne Merrill, Policy Director, California Climate and Agriculture Network, elaborates on what AB32 could mean for farmers. The proposed carbon trading system, currently under development by the California Air Resources Board, would enable a farm, she says, “to reduce its own emissions, voluntarily, by being part of the carbon market.” Still other opportunities await farmers. A cap-and-trade system would generate revenue, a portion of which, her organization argues, “should go for the key things that we need to assist California agriculture to remain viable when temperatures rise and water become more constrained.” Paul Martin, Director of Environmental Services, Western United Dairymen, says farmers should be guided by a three-legged stool of sustainability: ethical production, scientific and environmental responsibility, and economic performance. His distilled message: “We need organic food because people want it. We need grass-fed because people want it. We need natural because people want it. And we need conventional because people want that kind of food.” California’s new Department of Food and Agriculture Secretary, Karen Ross, is encouraged that food had finally entered the policy debate, and expresses optimism that young people will carry it forward. “There’s a renewed interest in where our food comes from, how it’s produced, and who is producing it.” She highlights the role of cities in shaping a more sustainable food policy. “It’s the real intersection of agriculture, food, health, and nutrition,” she gushes. “Cities are saying, ‘We can do something about this.’ It’s about identifying open plots for community gardens. It’s about making sure access to nutritious, locally grown food is available. It’s about understanding what it takes to help those farmers on the urban edge, or right in our local communities.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on June 14, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Salmon Odyssey Phil Isenberg, Chair, Delta Vision Task Force James Norton, Filmmaker, Salmon: Running the Gauntlet Jonathan Rosenfield, Ph.D., Conservation Biologist, The Bay Institute In the post-World War II boom, previous generations prioritized cheap electricity and economic development over salmon. On the West Coast, huge dams blocked rivers and sprawl fragmented habitat. If wild salmon are to survive, in California and elsewhere, we must acknowledge that well-intentioned human ingenuity has failed and that tough choices wait, says this panel of experts.“We overestimated our ability to mitigate the impacts of that dam construction,” says James Norton, writer and producer of Salmon: Running the Gauntlet. Fish ladders, hatcheries, barging – all have been deployed in an attempt to work around Mother Nature. “It’s turned out to be much more complicated than that, and it’s never really worked,” he says. The complications don’t end there. In trying to sustain a commercial salmon fishery even as dams killed fish and sprawl chewed up habitat, salmon and fisherman both lost. The result: commercial fishing is “remnant industry,” Norton says, with 30,000 jobs lost on the West Coast in past 20 years. To Norton, the lessons of this troubled history are clear. “I’d get out of the business of managing complex ecosystems. We’ve learned, over the last 150 years, there’s no appropriate surrogate for the natural productivity of these systems. We’ve learned that abundance – true abundance – is the default condition of these places. It’s not something that we tease out of them by being really clever.”For Phil Isenberg, Chair, Delta Stewardship Council, it’s all about our establishing priorities. He notes that in California demands for water and ecosystems are on equal footing, which should work to the benefit of salmon. “We have fought since before WWII the question of whether the human use of water is always more important than anything else. At least in California, the answer is No, it’s not.” Jonathan Rosenfield, a conservation biologist with The Bay Institute, cautions against pitting salmon against people or jobs. “It doesn’t need to be framed in terms of either farmers in the Central Valley have water, or we have salmon.” We do, he says, need to heed the message sent by the salmon’s decline. “Salmon are a hardy, adaptable, incredibly creative species that have survived for millions of years, through several ice ages, in every watershed up and down this coast. The fact that we can’t maintain them in the system says that we have way, way overreached any semblance of balance between human use and what our ecosystems need.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on June 3rd, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sustainable Urbanism Stuart Cohen, Executive Director, TransForm Mike Ghielmetti, President, Signature Development Group Ezra Rapport, Executive Director, Association of Bay Area Governments Infill development is hard. Even in California, one of the few states to have given local officials guidance on how to plan for growth, building smart, sustainable projects close to transit is a challenge, says this panel of experts.“People say, ‘We can’t do enough infill.’ There are too many obstacles to doing it right,” says Stuart Cohen, Executive Director, TransForm. “But those are obstacles we have control of. I am hopeful for the future, but we need to create a vision for the future that people can believe in. Infill development, if done right – and it’s a big if – can actually enhance our communities.” Mike Ghielmetti, President, Signature Properties, a Bay Area developer, describes a process riddled with uncertainty and risk. Will city council members be in office and planning officials their jobs over the five to 10 years it may take to build a project? Who will pay for schools and parks? Does the project site contain historic buildings? Is the site contaminated? Despite the challenges, “We have to push this vision forward,” Ghielmetti says. “We have to figure out a way to accommodate growth, so that we can provide housing for all levels of society. We can provide for new jobs and economic vitality.” Realizing that California could not meet its greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals under AB32 without tackling emissions from cars, lawmakers, in 2008, passed SB375. The law directly confronts emissions from transportation by forcing cities to plan for growth that reduces miles driven and clusters new development near existing transit and services. Ezra Rapport, Executive Director, Association of Bay Area Governments, says the process outlined in SB375 should help reduce uncertainty and insulate planning decisions from local political considerations. Under the law, 18 metropolitan planning organizations (MPO) will set regional 2020 and 2035 GHG reductions targets for cars. Each MPO will then prepare a Sustainable Communities Strategy that demonstrates how the region will meet its greenhouse gas reduction target. Rapport says those plans will remove some of the project-by-project uncertainty. “The election cycle is obviously paramount in all politicians’ minds,” he says. “But when they’re sitting on the city council, talking about the plan for growth that will take place over the next 10 to 20 years, they’re not really challenged in their election cycles by those decisions.” “In my point of view, if a project is properly planned, and it has community buy-in, and it’s continually refreshed, you will get support,” he says. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on May 25th, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peter Calthorpe, Founder, Calthorpe Associates; Author, Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change It’s a love story gone horribly wrong. Big cars, ever-bigger homes, distant suburbs – all of it kept afloat by cheap oil. If this American arrangement ever made sense, it certainly doesn’t now, Peter Calthorpe says. Tragically, we’re perpetuating this failed system in much of the country, ignoring a cheaper, greener alternative: urbanism. “It’s better than free,” says Calthorpe, founder of Calthorpe Associates and author of Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change. “It costs less money to build smart, walkable, transit-oriented communities than it does to build sprawl. It takes up less land, it uses less energy, it uses less infrastructure, less roads … less of everything.” For Calthorpe, the ruptured housing bubble revealed a broken system but offers a chance to rethink how we build. “The real estate recession was a sign not just of perverse bank financing,” he says, “it was also a manifestation that we’d been building too much of the wrong stuff for too long, specifically large-lot, single-family subdivisions.” Why did we overbuild? “Habit and inertia,” Calthorpe says. “There’s tremendous institutional inertia” – banks, homebuilders, and zoning. “We have land-use maps that dictate low density in many areas and single use in most areas.” Calthorpe dismisses the notion that every American yearns for a piece of suburbia. Households with kids represent just 24 percent of the total, he says. The rest – singles, empty nesters, young couples – have different needs. “There are a whole range of needs out there and lifestyles that the one-size-fits-all subdivision just doesn’t satisfy,” he says. Calthorpe gives an example from his firm’s work, Stapleton, the nation’s largest redevelopment project. There, 12,000 units are going up on 4,500 acres – four times the density of the typical suburb – at the site of Denver’s old airport. “People spend more dollars per square foot for a smaller house and a smaller lot,” Calthorpe says, “but it’s in a walkable community; they’re willing to make that trade.”Change will require hard choices. Calthorpe challenges environmentalists to accept that infill alone won’t be able to meet the demand for housing; in some areas, projects cited near transit, for instance, building on greenfields may be necessary. We must also be willing to partner with developers. Development can help pay for a lot of the things we need, Calthorpe says: levees, transit extensions, flood control projects, parks, open space, and schools. “Quite frankly, the Bay Area should be thankful that we have the growth to deal with because it’s what we can use to repair so much of what we’ve misdesigned,” he says. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on May 25th, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wal-Mart: Force of Nature or Greenwashing? Edward Humes, Author, Force of Nature Greg Dalton, Vice President of Special Projects, The Commonwealth Club; Founder, Climate One - Moderator Wal-Mart is not a sustainable company, says author Edward Humes. But the mega-retailer is making money by investing in sustainability. The story of how Wal-Mart made the pivot toward green is well told by Humes, author of Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution. The unlikely hero is Jib Ellison, an elite river guide-turned sustainability consultant. Through connections, Ellison wrangled a meeting with then-Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott. Ellison’s message for Scott: Wal-Mart’s practices are riddled with waste and it’s costing you money. The retort: Prove it. A series of early successes won over Scott and, it’s not a stretch to say, changed the direction of the company. Wal-Mart added auxiliary generators to its 7,000-truck fleet. Fuel savings netted the company hundreds of millions of dollars. Next, someone suggested that a toymaker reduce the size of the box holding a toy truck. One year, and 497 avoided shipping containers later, Wal-Mart had saved $2.5 million on fuel and materials. “That was an early proof of concept that doing something that was lowering the footprint and more sustainable – baby steps, obviously – had a big return,” he says. Executives now asked, “‘What if we go across all of our products and start looking for those kinds of opportunities,’” says Humes. “And it began to snowball. It stopped being a hippy proposition that some river guide came up with, and started being more of a no-brainer business proposition.” When Climate One’s Greg Dalton asks the inevitable question about greenwashing, Humes is ready. “It sounds like we’re up here singing Wal-Mart’s praises.” But, he goes on, “this isn’t a chorus of ‘Wal-Mart is fabulous.’ It’s a very specific change in the way they’ve decided to do business, which is to try and be more sustainable because it makes economic sense to do so.” Humes credits Lee Scott and Wal-Mart for giving peers cover to follow their lead. “They made it safe for other companies to have the same conversation about sustainability because they’ve shown maybe it’s not so crazy and risky after all. I think they are a large reason why sustainability is even a word that big businesses talk about.” For Humes, the stakes are too high to quibble over Wal-Mart’s motivations. “I think they’ve been pretty careful about saying, ‘We’re not a green company.’ They never will be a green company. They’re an out-sourced, big-box retailer that wants you to buy ever-more amounts of stuff,” he says. But “if you’re driving 60 miles-an-hour towards oblivion and slow the car down to 20 miles-an-hour, is that a good thing? I think it is.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on May 16th, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charge It? Rob Bearman, Director, Global Alliances, Utilities and Energy, Better Place Mike DiNucci, VP of Strategic Accounts, Coulomb Technologies Jay Friedland, Legislative Director, Plug In America Jonathan Read, CEO, ECOtality Consumers are ready for electric vehicles. Entrepreneurs and policymakers just need to hustle to work out the kinks in the nationwide networks that will charge the cars, says this panel of experts assembled at Climate One. Automakers see a chance to free their customers from expensive oil, says Mike DiNucci, VP of Strategic Accounts, Coulomb Technologies: “Car companies see a golden opportunity to re-set that paradigm, and become more sustainably connected to their customers.” One company working to re-set the driving experience is Better Place, which plans to sells consumers miles through a network of charging and battery-swapping stations. “Better Place’s philosophy is we sell miles. The customer, the driver, should never have to think about kilowatt-hours. They should never have to plan, or have a timer at their charge spot,” says Rob Bearman, Director, Global Energy Alliance. Jonathan Read, CEO, ECOtality, says his company is working with utilities to develop real-time charging rates as low as $0.05 or $0.06 per kilowatt-hour during off-peak evening hours. “We’re always going to be competing between two minds: home charging and the price of gas. The consumer is always going to be making value judgments in between there. It’s our job as private-sector entrepreneurs to figure what is the tipping point” – at what point will consumers ditch gas cars for electricity, and how will they decide whether to charge in public or at home. Jay Friedland, Legislative Director, Plug In America, who has driven an electric Toyota RAV4 for a decade, says he’s confident consumers will get the price signals. He pays the equivalent of $0.75 per gallon to drive his EV, he says, cheaper than a gas-powered car by a factor of five in California, where gas is averaging over $4 per gallon. “EVs consumers will certainly get the pricing signal that comes from the utility, which is: If I get a bill, and my bill is high because I’ve been charging during the day time, and I know I can get cheap electricity at night, I’m going to go with the cheap electricity,” he says. Friedland and Rob Bearman both emphasize that EVs aren’t just cleaner and cheaper to drive; they are an important part of what Friedland calls a “virtuous cycle” – all-electric cars powered by renewable energy, stored and distributed, in part, by batteries. “Electric vehicles have the promise of taking cars off oil, and electric vehicle batteries have the promise of making the grid more renewable. As far as a cleantech solution that spans a lot of sectors in the cleantech industry, electric vehicles are really powerful,” says Rob Bearman. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on May 12th, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pole Position Forrest Beanum, Vice President of Government Relations, Coda Automotive Oliver Kuttner, CEO, Edison2 Bill Reinert, National Manager, Toyota Michael Robinson, VP for Environment, Energy and Safety Policy, General Motors Dan Sperling, Member, California Air Resources Board; Professor, UC Davis Fifteen years have passed since a major automaker has attempted to market an electric vehicle. Within five years, rare will be the auto showroom that lacks one. But before EVs dominate the market, industry, policymakers, and consumers will have to grapple with some unresolved questions, says this panel of industry giants and start-ups. Those questions are a primary reason why “in pure electric cars, there’s very little first-mover advantage,” says Bill Reinert, National Manager, Toyota, “when you’re out there trying to figure out where the infrastructure’s going to go, and how the tow service works, and what happens when the charger doesn’t charge your car.” Dan Sperling, member, California Air Resources Board, disagrees that carmakers should avoid positioning themselves as a leader in the EV race. Yes, there are technology and scaling challenges, he says, but being first “does create a hallo for the entire company, which Toyota understands better than anyone – what the Prius did.” Michael Robinson, VP for Environment, Energy and Safety Policy, General Motors, is coming to see the benefit of that green hallo. His company has sold 2,000 units of its extended-range electric car, the Chevy Volt, since it went on sale in late 2010. Half of those sales have come in California, Robinson says, and 90% of total sales have been to Prius owners. Oliver Kuttner, CEO, Edison2, says carmakers need to figure out how to design electric cars to be lighter and more efficient. “If we were to re-think the way a car is built, and built the car in a more efficient way, like an airplane,” you could downsize the battery – the most expensive piece of an EV, costing upwards of $10,000 to $15,000 per car. During the Q&A, an audience member asks if automakers might be underestimating the demand for EVs. “Absolutely,” responded Forrest Beanum, Vice President of Government Relations, Coda Automotive. He cites Coda’s reading of independent studies finding that 40% of consumers want to own or drive an electric vehicle. What might make the difference this time is that carmakers appear to want EVs to succeed. It might seem counterintuitive, says GM’s Michael Robinson, but “we’re actually pulling for one another to be successful. We want the technology to be successful.” Dan Sperling agrees. “We’re way ahead of the regulatory process. We’re way ahead of the market process. Standardization issues are a challenge. This is a big adventure – and hugely important. We have to make this successful,” he says. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on May 12th, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tim Flannery Professor of Science, Maquarie University; Chair, Copenhagen Climate Council; Author, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet Greg Dalton, Vice President of Special Projects, The Commonwealth Club; Founder, Climate One - Moderator Tim Flannery doesn’t do pessimism. Flannery explains the source of his optimism, a major theme of his new book, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, in this Climate One conversation at the Hoover Theatre, in San Jose. It stems from what he says is a popular misunderstanding of what natural selection actually is. “This is not a ‘survival of the fittest world,’” he says, referring to the phrase used as shorthand for Darwin’s perceived worldview. “This is a world where evolution has spawned extraordinary interrelationships, interactions, and co-evolutionary outcomes.” Over the last 10,000 years humanity has built what Flannery describes as a “super-organism” – a level of organization similar to that of ants, termites, or bees. And the glue that holds the super-organism together is the division of labor, interdependence. “That means,” says Flannery, “that the survival of the super-organism becomes all-important to us. We can’t afford to back up the planet.” And as “we form this one great super-organism, where we are all interconnected, we gain the capacity to deal with environmental challenges.” And for the biggest environmental challenge of all, climate change, Flannery sees reason for hope where others despair. Take COP15, the momentous United Nations climate change conference convened in Copenhagen in December 2009. Conventional wisdom holds that COP15 was a failure. Flannery disagrees. “I think it is self-evident it wasn’t a failure,” he says. The meeting was the setting for the largest-ever gathering of heads of state. Countries accounting for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions made reduction pledges. Flannery sees progress across the map. China is a global leader in wind and solar energy, and is preparing to launch regional carbon cap-and-trade systems. India has enacted a small tax on coal and recently launched an aggressive energy efficiency trading scheme. South Korea is spending 2% of GDP on green growth. The European Union raised its 2020 emissions reduction target from 20% to a minimum of 25%. The United States is halfway to reaching its goal of reducing emissions 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. “The job now for us,” Flannery says, “is to knuckle down and make sure that our countries carry their fair share of the burden. We need to have hope. We need look at things over the right time scale. And we need to re-gather the energy that’s required to carry this further.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Historic Hoover Theatre in San Jose, CA on May 4th, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Member, United States Senate (D-CA) in conversation with Greg Dalton, Founder of Climate One at The Commonwealth Club In this Climate One conversation at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, in San Francisco, Senator Dianne Feinstein touches on some longtime pursuits – national security experience and protecting the California desert from development. She also pledges to investigate the safety of the US nuclear fleet, protect children from toxins, and continue to shield California’s coastline from oil drilling. Feinstein is clear that clean energy is California’s future. “Energy is the largest source of new jobs for this state,” she says, citing an estimate placing the number at 100,000 additional jobs. Those new energy jobs – such as building large solar thermal power plants – should not be located, however, in the state’s undeveloped desert. “There is plenty of land in the desert that is disturbed that can be used. I think all of these [solar] companies are essentially finding other places to build, where there is no real environmental challenge to things that are endangered like desert tortoises,” says Feinstein. A trickier problem, especially in the wake of the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear complex, is how to ensure the safety of, and store spent fuel from, America’s nuclear reactors. Insufficient attention has been paid to the full nuclear fuel cycle, Feinstein says. “I believe very strongly that we need either regional or centralized nuclear fuel storage. It’s asking for trouble to keep hot rods in spent pools for decades and dry casks right along the side of nuclear reactors. I think they should be moved right away.” She also pledges quick action on plant safety. “I’m going to try to push as far and as fast as I can push to see that we really take a good look, a real examination, of all the facilities,” says Feinstein. Feinstein warns against the danger posed by exposure to chemicals, especially for infants. Of particular concern is Bisphenol A (BPA), a known endocrine disruptor, which, she says, is added to the inside of canned goods and baby bottles. “I become very interested in chemicals that are added that we know very little about,” says Feinstein. Though a proponent of greater energy efficiency (in the Q&A, Feinstein cites her decades-long quest to boost fuel efficiency standards for new vehicles as her proudest Senate achievement) Feinstein says now is not the time to raise the gas tax. “I’d go slowly on that. We have very long commutes for workers in this state,” she says. “This is not the time, when gasoline is this high, with the nation trying to pull itself out of recession. We need to keep gasoline below the $4 mark right now,” Feinstein says. She blamed speculators for the high prices: “Demand is down, and supply is even – so what can it be?” She reaffirms that oil companies should not look to California’s coast for additional supply. “The people of California have spoken through initiative. They don’t want oil drilling off the coast.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on April 27, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Measure What? Michel Gelobter, Chief Green Officer, Hara Eric Olson, Senior Vice President, Advisory Services, BSR Glen Low, Principal, Blu Skye Forward-thinking companies are coming to realize that sustainability isn’t just good for their bottom lines; it makes it easier to win over customers and compete in the market, say three corporate greening experts. As new tools such as carbon accounting software become more sophisticated and widely adopted, the panelists say, benefits will accrue not only to more efficient companies but to customers better able to trust companies’ green claims. First, says Eric Olson, Senior Vice President, Business for Social Responsibility, companies need to figure out whether they should they be listening to their customers, or leading them. Olson leans toward the latter. “There is a school of thought that says what we are talking about is so complex that what consumers want is for us to solve the problem for them,” he says. “They’re not going to sit down and ask for fair trade coffee – they don’t even know what that is. But they do know that they want a product that doesn’t have practices behind it that they wouldn’t believe in,” he adds. In a relatively recent shift, companies aren’t making green strides just because regulators forced them to. “Sustainability leadership about five years ago was very compliance oriented. Sustainability leadership today is about competitive advantage. It’s about innovation,” says Glen Low, Principal, Blu Skye, a sustainability consultancy. In a rapidly changing landscape, smart companies that pivot toward efficiency now, be they small firms or industry giants, will be big winners, says Michel Gelobter, Chief Green Officer, Hara.“There are a lot of companies, like a Wal-Mart, that are taking pretty aggressive actions right now,” he says. “The biggest value of scale is the size of the bets that you can win. The best use of large capital is winning big-risk bets. There’s a history of very big industries emerging from these kinds of pivotal moments.” Sustainability represents one of those pivotal moments, he says. All the positioning among agile companies looking to gain a green edge has led to a relatively new development, says Eric Olson: companies influencing policy in a progressive direction. These companies, Olson says, are clamoring for Congress to act, by stating: “We need a level playing field. We need incentives. We need long-term, predictable signals around the cost of energy sources in order to be as competitive as we should be.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on April 15th, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cell Power: Sprint CEO Dan Hesse Dan Hesse, CEO, Sprint Nextel Sprint wants to be recognized as the green leader in the wireless industry, says CEO Dan Hesse in this return visit to Climate One. Hesse warns against the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile and announces the release of the fourth phone in Sprint’s green series, the Samsung Replenish. “As we meet here today,” Hesse says, “the innovative power of the wireless industry is under serious threat” by the proposed AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile. Much had already been written about the possible implications of the move for consumers and pricing, he says, “but to my surprise, very little attention had been paid to its potential impact on the wireless industry’s ability to foster innovation” – including innovation in the green space. “Wireless technology helps consumers by providing new ways to reduce, re-use, and recycle,” says Hesse. Take telecommuting. Just 3.9% of Americans regularly work outside the office, he says, even though wireless technology gives them access to the same information at their office desks. Hesse says Sprint is also working to address one of the industry’s lingering dilemmas: waste. Just 10% of mobiles phones are recycled each year in the United States, he says, meaning some 140 million phones end up in landfills. In 2008, Sprint set a goal to recycle 90% of the phones it sells. The new Samsung Replenish “is as green as we could make it,” says Hesse – energy-efficient, housed in recycled plastics, and made from 82% recyclable materials. In an effort to “take green really mainstream,” Hesse says, Sprint is lowering the monthly rate for the Replenish by $10 per month. The green moves and others – including connecting ECOtality’s Blink electric vehicle charging network, purchasing wind energy for its corporate headquarters, and upgrading the energy efficiency of its network – are done to improve the company’s brand, Hesse says, but also to motivate employees. “The thing about green is your people want to make it. They’re excited and love the fact that this is what we’re really focusing on, and that we have made it to a goal they care about,” Hesse says. “I’ve had zero pushback in getting people aligned and wanting to do it.” This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on April 15th, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nuclear Power: Setting Sun? Jacques Besnainou, CEO AREVA Inc. Lucas Davis, Professor, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley Jeff Byron, Former Commissioner, California Energy Commission This panel agrees that nuclear power, despite offering the promise of carbon-free electricity and safer next-generation reactors, is challenged by steep upfront costs and where to store spent fuel. Jeff Byron, formerly a member of the California Energy Commission, says the Fukushima tragedy offers the nuclear industry and its regulators a sobering learning opportunity. “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission just can’t go ahead and rubber-stamp license renewal applications,” says Byron. Uncertainty over how to proceed has put the United States in a bind, he adds. The US nuclear fleet is aging, with every reactor at least 30 years old. “We really want to retire them,” Byron says. “We’re extending the license of every one of these existing plants well beyond their intended design life. These are 50-year-old designs. I wouldn’t get on a 50-year-old aircraft if you paid me.” Lucas Davis, an energy economist based at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, warns against the prohibitive expense required to replace all of those aging plants. “If you look at lifetime costs, including waste disposal at the end, the levelized cost of nuclear, with updated cost and fuel numbers, is about $0.10 per kilowatt-hour compared to $0.05/kWh for natural gas. That’s a big gap,” he says. Despite the obstacles, Jacques Besnainou, CEO of US-based AREVA Inc., insists that policymakers maintain nuclear in the energy mix. ”I’m not saying nuclear is the solution. But there is no solution without nuclear energy,” he says. Lucas Davis agrees, offering that he’d welcome to be proved wrong on the question of costs. “Get in there and prove to us that you guys can build reactors on budget and an on time. That would change everything. But, to be fair, for 60 years the industry has been saying that costs are going to come down and the empirical evidence on it is pretty mixed,” he says. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco on April 8th, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices