David W. Orr discusses climate change politics, obstacles, proposals and solutions

Beyond Zero talks to David Orr about the implications of the recent Barack Obama inauguration, the leadership vacuum of previous U.S. administrations, and the Presidential Climate Action Plan, (a 100 day plan for instituting global warming measures nation-wide). We also discuss climate change issues including some obstacles we face, some proposals for change and the necessity of creating an economy based on energy-efficiency and renewable energy.

Buy his latest book, Confronting Climate Collapse

David W. Orr podcast

download

Transcript

Beyond Zero interviews David Orr, whose latest book 'Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse' can be pre-ordered here.

Scott Bilby: My name is Scott Bilby and this morning on Beyond Zero I'll be speaking with David Orr. David is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and a James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont.

He is the recipient of four Honorary degrees and other awards including The Millennium Leadership Award from Global Green, the Bioneers Award, the National Wildlife Federation Leadership Award, and a Lyndhurst Prize acknowledging "persons of exceptional moral character, vision, and energy."

He has been a scholar in residence at a range of universities and has lectured at many colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and throughout Europe. He serves as a Trustee for several organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is also an author, and he is an expert in a range of fields, but this morning we'll be concentrating on the areas of energy efficiency and politics in relation to climate change.

Hello David, are you there?

David Orr: Hello Scott. How are you?

Scott: I'm very good, thank you. Thanks for joining us from Ohio, and I hope you've had a great day so far. I'm looking forward to our interview.

David: It's been a great day. Thanks very much.

Scott: The inauguration of the new President, President Obama, has obviously caused a bit of a stir around the world and people are quite excited; left-leaning people who are looking for a renewable energy transition. How did you feel about Obama's election?

David: Oh, I felt great about it. It had been a long eight years between 2001 and 2008, so I felt great about it. I think President Obama is a gifted leader, he's smart, he knows what the issues are, and specifically on climate change I think he's pledged to act very quickly on this issue.

Scott: Now, you've said that he faces unprecedented challenges, and obviously one of those is the climate change threat that we face, and that there's little margin for error, and that "he must act quickly, decisively and wisely".

I guess this would probably be a good time to speak about the Presidential Climate Action Plan, what it is, and essentially, I think was it you who first proposed that?

David: Well, it was something I proposed and we hired, or we set up, an executive committee based on the proposition I'd made, and Bill Becker who had been an employee at the U.S. Department of Energy was actually the executive director of it. He did a terrific job pulling the strands together and gained final,report out. Worked two and a half years on it.

We had a group of maybe 100, 150 people total work on it, climate scientists and policy experts, people from business and academy and government and so forth. So, I was a broad brush effort.

Our focus was what the President, Democrat or Republican, would have to do if they took this issue as seriously as it warrants, or is merited, in the first 100 days of their administration. And clearly behind that Scott, is the idea that there is no time to waste; that the issue isn't just one on a long list of issues confronting the President, it is in fact the linch-pin issue connecting all the other issues. And so we set about to develop as thorough and complete a plan for the White House, the incoming administration.
We met with Mr. Obama as a candidate, and met several times with his transition team, and along with the other candidate and his transition team.

But the problem I think is this. Since we finished the report there has been a financial implosion and it's clear that Mr. Obama, and other world leaders, really do face now two different kinds of deficits.

There is one that is economic. It is relatively, as these things go, short-term. It will last a year or two, three, maybe four and it's likely that we will solve that problem, as we will, sooner or later, but perhaps in a way that will compound the second deficit, which is of course the climate deficit.

So, I think one of the challenges of leadership in his administration is to solve the economic crisis in a way that doesn't compound the climate crisis, the environmental deficit that we are running planet-wide, and in fact helps to solve it by creating green jobs, putting people to work, manufacturing the foundations for the next economy powered by sunlight.

Scott: And you say that one model for action is the first one hundred days of the Roosevelt administration back in 1933. Can you explain that to the audience?

David: Well, Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, in the middle of the Great depression which had been kicked off by the stock market crash in Fall (the autumn) of 1929. And Roosevelt in his first one hundred days did amazing thing; passed over a dozen major pieces of major legislation, stopped the run on the banks, began to set up agencies that put people to work, the Civilian Conservation Core and so forth, I mean it was a remarkable period of creative government after a prior period of lethargy and confusion on the part of the Hoover administration, and even before that back into the Calvin Coolidge administration of the early 1920's.

So, we felt that was, I mean it's an historically very known phrase, ‘100 days', the phrase actually goes back to Napoleon's escape from Elbe just prior to the Battle of Waterloo.

But plight of the Roosevelt administration, it was the shift in the way we thought about government. That people who were out of work at that time, unemployment was 25% of the country, gross national product had fallen by half, and Franklin Roosevelt had a very different approach to government than Herbert Hoover did. The government wasn't the problem, it could be properly directed and properly managed; it could be a solution to this global economic meltdown.

I think President Obama has the same view that government in the Untied States now isn't the problem as it was conceived to be by the Bush administration and all the way back to Ronald Reagan, but in fact properly managed, properly led, with sufficient vision, it can be a solution. It can help get the country moving again and back on a, or onto a path that takes us towards a sustainable economy and help to lead the worldwide transition in that direction.

So, I think it's an exciting time, and I think he's the right person for the role. Whether this is exactly like 1933 or not, you know, historians can debate that later; but it's clear in both cases there's an urgent need for leadership and vision and competence in the arts of governance.

Scott: Well, there certainly are parallels, and it's a very interesting parallel. So you say prior to Roosevelt, you had Hoover, et al, who were running the country and I'm assuming they represent the leadership vacuum that you also say the Bush administration more recently represented. Can you talk a little bit about the leadership vacuum?

David: Oh boy, how much time do we have?

[Laughter]

Scott: Oh, yeah, we don't have long.

David: Scott, I think the United States really suffered in the last eight years, and I don't think it's necessarily a Republican versus Democrat issue. In other words I don't believe it's just a matter of party affiliation. I think it's a matter of governing philosophy and the administration made a very large mistake on 9/11, in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade towers, in making that a matter for war. It was clearly a criminal activity, and we could have gone about that rather like we did with (Slobodan) Milosevic, but we didn't do that. George Bush, Dick Cheney decided to make it a matter for war, and so we were off and running in war and now we find ourselves embroiled in two countries and are not winning in wither case.

And that was the start, I think, of a real downturn in the United States. The ultimate cost of it could be as high in one estimate as three trillion dollars. That's money we can't afford and clearly with the meltdown in the economy now that the government's having to step in and effectively borrow or print money to bail out the auto industry and the banks, the stimulus package being discussed this week (as of Feb 6th, 2009) is over 800 billion dollars and it won't be the end of it. But it's the upshot of a decade or longer of pretty bad leadership.

On matters of climate, which are of concern to this program, it was rather like an Australian ‘walkabout', we simply ignored the issue and didn't do a thing about it. The administration then corrupted the science, effectively lying to the public about what was true scientifically and what wasn't, but in any event did not move on the issue and there was lots to be done, and the tragedy, I think on my part, in my view, is that what we would have done to forestall climate change or respond effectively to it would be exactly the same thing we would do if we were concerned about improving the economy.

So, you didn't necessarily have to believe that climate change is real, we still have climate sceptics here and people believe that the Earth is flat I suppose, but it didn't matter because the same things that we would do to improve the economy, to stop the haemorrhage of money leaving the United States to buy energy from Saudi Arabia and other places that we really don't need, was huge.

We spent upwards of, by the time you add up all both the purchases and military costs and the subsidies, the number probably goes well over one trillion dollars per year spent when we could get by with at least half of that, and improve the economy, strengthen the number of jobs and the local economies in places like Ohio where I live, but that's not what we did and the reason is there was simply a vacuum, a kind of like a wilfully created vacuum.

Scott: Now, I've got a quote here which ties in, I think, nicely with that because we are in, hopefully, a special moment in time, in history, and hopefully a time for real change. And I'd just like to read this quote here, (so if you hear a bit of rustling of paper), but I thought this was quite apt and it mentions you and I really liked it, and it said, well basically it's in regard to failed energy policies by successive administrations in the U.S. and around the world, and I was reading from a paper called, "Prospects for the Sustainability Movement" by Tom Jones, whose the Dean of the College of Architecture and Environmental Design. He writes that Conservative author (Clyde) Prestowitz, who spent much of his career as a businessman and in Republican policy circles in Washington, devotes a major section in one of his recent books to a critique of the failed U.S. energy and global warming policy under several of the last Presidents, and this sounds remarkably like the same things that writer David Orr has been talking about and so when you get writers from opposite ends of the political spectrum reaching similar conclusions, when they call us to take responsible action as a nation, it gives us hope that a broad number of Americans may also be ready for leadership and bi-partisan solutions. So, basically is the view that the U.S.' energy policies have been a failure one that is often aired publicly in the U.S. now?

David: Yes, I think so, and Clyde Prestowitz is a person who I have a lot of respect for. I think there is, whether you deem yourself a liberal or a conservative, it doesn't really make much difference because on both sides you can arrive at the conclusion that we shouldn't waste money on unnecessary energy expenditures, that if we do anything like full-cost pricing pollution from coal-fired power plants is both a health hazard to, it prematurely ends 50,000 more lives per year in the United States, but then also contributes to climate change and is the largest source of mercury pollution in the United States.

So, there are all kinds of reasons to converge on the same set of solutions, and it's an economy that would be run by hyper-efficiency, the kind of efficiency that's now technically possible, it'd be an economy that doesn't really buy more energy that it really needs and could put the savings into education and health care and improving cities and so forth, it's an economy or a country that doesn't fight wars for oil that it doesn't need, it can selectively engage itself in turbulent places like the Middle East in ways as it would want to do but not for reasons of oil. There's a long list of advantages that are recognised, I think, by conservatives like Clyde Prestowitz or James Woolsey, former head of the C.I.A., or people taking a more liberal stripe like Barack Obama.

Scott: Now, I'll just say you're listening to 3CR and we're speaking with David Orr. He is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and a James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont.

So, on that theme David, given the rapid pace of renewable energy uptake around the world and the fact that in more and more places renewable energy, as you've just said, is now cost competitive with fossil fuel power when externalities are accounted for, is business becoming probably the most prominent driver in addressing global warming simply because their looking for the best economic outcome, or is ‘people power' still the biggest element?

David: Scott, I think that business is definitely now a player, as are venture capital markets. It's hard if you're venture capitalists, I'm sure, you look at something grow at the rate of 40% per year, as wind and solar are worldwide, and then walk away from it. And we're trying to get away from an economy powered by various carbon sources and make way for an economy that's powered by efficiency, which is improving rapidly, as people like Amory Lovins has been saying for years, and sunlight and wind and others things that are in the pipeline that we can scarcely imagine.

So, I think the role of business in this I think has been dramatically changed, but it will still require government leadership, because only governments can set the ground rules in which business operates, and one of the great neglects I think of the past 25 or 30 years in the United States has been around the arts of governance relative to these long term issues like environmental improvement and containing climate change before it passes a point that none of us want it to pass.

So, I think there's a new era possible to build around green business, working in partnership with the civil sector and NGOs, but also in a world in which governments set the ground rules for pricing and for regulation and for tax investment that directs us on a very different path. I don't think the market can do it on its own. I think it's expecting way too much for markets.

Scott: So, you're saying they're both players, and people-power is still very important and obviously just reducing emissions via industry is not going to be enough. Energy efficiency is going to be very important but in and of itself is not going to be enough, and we've also got to think about things such as just, I guess just consuming less. And I was reading something by a woman called Sharon Beder and she's at the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong in Australia, and she said a great thing, (paraphrasing) ‘the desire to consume is portrayed as a natural, human desire, however it's clear that people have been manipulated into being consumers. What people really want is not so much to consume, they want status and essentially if we could create a system where status, which we all crave, was based on wisdom not wealth, and compassion and cooperation instead of competition, well, basically she's saying people could consume less and the natural environment would benefit. Do you have any thoughts on that?

David: Oh, I think that's very good. Yes, I do, and this is going to complicate the conversation a little bit, but we know now from studies coming out in the States, the National Academy of Sciences has just put out a report authored by Susan Solomon and some other co-authors on the longevity of climate effects and it mirrors reports in Nature magazine and a book by David Archer, who is a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, that the effects of climate change will be long lived. In other words, in some sense, this is not a solve-able problem in the way we normally think of solving problems. It's a problem we might contain if we move quickly enough but that we have to live with the effects of climate change for a long time to come. And Solomon's work in particular points out that the effects of climate change will last perhaps as long as a thousand years.

It may be longer than that. If we pass some point of emissions and go to 400 or 450 or 500 parts per million, the effects could be much longer lived. But in any event, a thousand years, or even a couple of hundred years, is longer than we're typically used to thinking. So, the belief that this is a solve-able issue, without making pretty radical changes in how we live and how we distribute wealth and so forth I think is simply not going to turn out to be true. This is going to require major changes in the way we've made the human presence on the planet.

Scott: Now, I agree whole-heartedly with that sentiment, and it's good that people, more and more are being told that this is actually the reality and in many ways it's not something to be scared of. If we do act, and we act genuinely, I think that in some ways it could be quite a nice and bright future as far as greater social, perhaps, cohesion if we don't leave it too long. If we leave it too long then I think there's going to be a huge breakdown in society and obviously there's going to be a lot of species becoming extinct at an even faster rate than we've already got.

But, I would also like to talk to you about, um, is it James Hansen's idea about the carbon tax and the 100% dividend? I'd like to have you explain to us how that works.

David: Well, I think there are a number of proposals by which we would effectively monetise the use, or the combustion, of carbon and all of them have one major characteristic and that being that if you burn carbon-based fuels, you pay for it. And then the question is who do you pay it to, and what happens to that reservoir of money?

Peter Barnes, for example, has proposed a Sky Trust by which he means that all of us effectively own the sky; every human being has a stake in it and so anybody that wants to use the atmosphere as a dump has to pay for it and that money then goes into a Sky Trust, it never goes into a government coffer. There'd be an independent board that would administer the funds for it and those funds come back to everybody on the Earth that has then an assigned share of that atmospheric trust.

I think there are lots of plans right now. There is in the States, till very recently, there's been a lot of momentum for a cap-and-trade system by which this government, and by extension the world, would agree to a cap of carbon emissions at such and such a level and then sign the rights to emit up to that level. Either give them away, as happened in the European Union, and it didn't work very well, or auction them off. And the proceeds of the auction then would go back to the public or go through some other agency, but they could go to help people whose purchase of energy are inelastic, at the bottom of the income spectrum, or help to pay for research and development or deploy renewable energy technologies, energy efficient technologies.

But no matter what the plan, I think there's several criteria that any workable plan would have to meet. It's got to be transparent, so we have to understand the flow of money and it's got to be transparent to the person in the street as well as to the professional economists.

It's got to be fair and that means as prices for energy go up, people that are going to be hard hit by that need to be supported in some fashion.

It's got to build, or pave the way, for a very different economy. So, some part of those revenues have got to come back and help deploy technologies, do R&D on those that we're clearly going to need in the future.

And then I think it's got to be very quick. It's got to be something we can agree to rather quickly, which means it can't be all that complicated. But there are a number of proposals there; Hansen's is one, Peter Barnes' is one, cap-and-trade systems of varying sorts are being proposed by lots of folks.

There's always the idea simply of taxing energy based on its carbon content. That actually has gained some momentum in the United States in the past few weeks at least, in a kind of surprising way, but in any event whatever happens needs to meet those four or five criteria.

Scott: Now, I would like to, because I think we're coming to the end of our time unfortunately, so I'd like to get back to talking a little bit about President Obama, the Presidential Climate Action Plan, and essentially has there been any sign of the Presidential Climate Action Plan, and other such initiatives, influencing Obama in his first three weeks in office?

David: Scott, yeah, I think there has been. We met with, Bill Becker and several of us that had worked on that document, met with John Podesta, who was the Transition Team director for President-elect Obama, and then the transition after the election I think did have an impact. There were lots of people pushing in the same direction.

I think it's not saying too much that the PCAP document, the President's Climate Action Plan that we worked on, became I think the gold standard for climate thinking based on that one hundred day slice of time. I think frankly we did the best and most thorough job, and I believe it was very well received. I think you can find chunks of our thinking… but I hesitate to claim that we were the only one. There were many people working on similar kinds of documents and similar kinds of plans, most all of them with a longer timeframe than ours; so we were trying to be inclusive, not exclusive, and as thorough as you could possibly be. So, ours I believe was the most thorough bit of planning but it was not certainly the only document. We were not the only people pushing climate issues, there were many, many groups out there. There was the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the United States National Wildlife Federation, and many others.

But I think the administration, in contrast to its predecessor, was open to hearing ideas, and that was hugely encouraging and I think the one thing, Scott, in the meantime has been that this economic crisis has almost pre-empted everything else as far as policy, and so I think we're now waiting to see if the President will aim to solve the climate crisis and the economic downturn with a common set of solutions. And I believe that's the direction which he's going. We've heard a lot about green jobs and wind power and solar power and so forth in the stimulus package that's being debated in Congress right now.

Scott: Well, that's great to hear because as people on Beyond Zero have heard quite a few times the sort of stimulus packages that, well the western world and the world in general needs now are pretty much the same thing, as you say, that's also going to solve this climate crisis as much as we can at this late stage.

So, thank you very much David for speaking with us this morning on our show.

David: Well, Scott, thank you very much for having me and you have a good day…

Buy David Orr's latest book, Confronting Climate Collapse

Related websites:

http://www.davidworr.com

Presidential Climate Action Project website

Info on David at Oberlin College

Rocky Mountain Institute

Aldo Leopold Foundation

Transcription by Beyond Zero Emissions