Latest / Simmer Down / Christine Todd Whitman: A C-Change Conversation

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Christine Todd Whitman: A C-Change Conversation · Simmer Down

0:00
SPEAKER_05: Thank you all so much for being here.
0:03
SPEAKER_05: I know it is a little crowded.
0:04
SPEAKER_05: We've got uh four the front row.
0:10
SPEAKER_05: Anyone in the pink gallery who would like to sit in the front row?
0:14
SPEAKER_05: And there's uh seats up there too.
0:18
SPEAKER_05: Uh and we've got lots of seating in the kitchen.
0:20
SPEAKER_05: We've got more seating right here in the dining room.
0:23
SPEAKER_05: Um so, and a few more.
0:26
SPEAKER_05: Anyway, if you get too hot, please tell me, because I'm happy to open windows, especially you all if you get too hot, because I wasn't anticipating it being quite as warm today.
0:34
SPEAKER_05: Thank you all so much for being here.
0:36
SPEAKER_05: Um for those of you who I don't know, although I think I know almost everybody in this room, which is wonderful, I am Catherine Sedamon Aristoff.
0:44
SPEAKER_05: And um on behalf of my husband Andrew and me, uh Andrew, welcome.
0:50
SPEAKER_05: Andrew unfortunately had to uh bolt out the door because his mom uh fell and broke her arm.
0:58
SPEAKER_05: So he uh is on train in New York right now, or he might be at um New York hospital by now.
1:04
SPEAKER_05: Anyway, so but he would love to have been here and and heard you, Governor Whitman.
1:09
SPEAKER_05: There's a long history between um the Todds and the Whitmans and the Sedamon Aristotle family, and it's it is a um personal honor and pleasure to have you here.
1:19
SPEAKER_05: So thank you very much for coming.
1:23
SPEAKER_05: Um to my prepared remarks, if I can do this.
1:30
SPEAKER_05: Okay, I really want to tell you a little bit about SeaChange.
1:34
SPEAKER_05: Um SeaChange Conversations is a nonpartisan, Princeton-based volunteer organization that seeks to elevate and inform the ongoing policy and political debate about climate change.
1:48
SPEAKER_05: And although as individuals we span the political spectrum, um we have varied life experiences and professional backgrounds.
2:03
SPEAKER_05: We do share a common commitment to bringing the often bitter and hyperpartisan conversation about climate change, what we believe to be a defining challenge of our era, back to the middle ground, a political space that values science, research, education, and reason.
2:28
SPEAKER_05: Since SeaChange was founded three years ago, we've sponsored a series of presentations on various facets of the climate change challenge, including impacts on agriculture, links to natural disasters, the implications for our national security and place designation, and building out a real business platform.
2:49
SPEAKER_05: So if you'd like to learn more about sea change, there are flyers on your chairs, there are going to be flyers at the front hall table on your way out.
2:57
SPEAKER_05: Uh if you would like to help us, we uh are always uh looking for people to help.
3:03
SPEAKER_06: Um also take a moment to uh introduce the rest of the sea change team.
3:11
SPEAKER_06: Uh if you wouldn't mind either waving or standing up, it's Katie Kim Thobbing.
3:16
SPEAKER_06: Katie.
3:17
SPEAKER_06: There you are.
3:19
SPEAKER_06: Pam Mount.
3:20
SPEAKER_06: Hi.
3:22
SPEAKER_06: Carrie Dijkman, Sophie Glovier, Kathy Herring is where?
3:29
SPEAKER_06: You can't.
3:32
SPEAKER_06: Harriet Brainerd and Kim Heron.
3:36
SPEAKER_06: Ken?
3:37
SPEAKER_07: Great.
3:38
SPEAKER_06: And I want to recognize these people because um I think we all know how much work it takes to put on an event like this.
3:46
SPEAKER_06: And this team has been doing it for three years, as you can see from the list that's on the back of your chair.
3:52
SPEAKER_06: They are an amazing group to work with.
3:55
SPEAKER_06: They are so creative, they bring their intelligence and their sense of fun, and it's been such an honor to be with them on this ride.
4:02
SPEAKER_06: So thank you, all ladies.
4:04
SPEAKER_06: Um, our guest tonight needs no introduction.
4:09
SPEAKER_06: Governor Whitman.
4:11
SPEAKER_06: So don't break the mold and don't.
4:17
SPEAKER_06: Okay, Governor Whitman.
4:23
SPEAKER_06: Um but I think we all know that Governor Whitman has an incredible uh amount of experience and insight into this very important topic.
4:34
SPEAKER_06: Governor Whitman has requested an interview format, so I will be uh asking her questions for about 30 minutes.
4:43
SPEAKER_06: I have about 60 to go through, but I will show forbearance.
4:49
SPEAKER_06: Um, and then I will open it up to the floor to all of you for another 20 minutes or so.
4:54
SPEAKER_06: Um my questions are going to focus on three areas.
4:58
SPEAKER_06: Specifically, what are the dangers of climate change and how might they impact us, those of us right here in the room?
5:07
SPEAKER_06: The second is providing a perspective on today's political environment.
5:13
SPEAKER_06: And the third is providing insight into the political strategies, public policies, and other actions that would help us as we move forward in addressing climate change.
5:24
SPEAKER_06: So Sea Change Conversations has been built on a premise that climate change is not an environmental issue.
5:33
SPEAKER_06: We see it as an issue that has direct implications for the things that Americans value most, and say they value the most when they go to vote.
5:46
SPEAKER_06: And that is our jobs and our economy, our personal security and our health, and our exposure to geopolitical instability, things like terrorism and refugee flows.
5:58
SPEAKER_06: Do you agree with this premise?
6:00
SPEAKER_06: And if so, can you tell us which of these areas you are most concerned about?
6:05
SPEAKER_08: Well, I change it just slightly because I wouldn't say it's not an environmental issue, because it is.
6:11
SPEAKER_08: I mean, that's part of it, but it is definitely a national security issue.
6:15
SPEAKER_08: Ronald Reagan is the one who put climate change on the NSA docket for regular consulting.
6:21
SPEAKER_08: Now he wasn't convinced about how much humans had impacted it, but he recognized it as a serious issue, and the joint chiefs of staff have all come out and pointed this out.
6:32
SPEAKER_08: Because when you look at what's happening, just take the Sub-Sahara Africa.
6:36
SPEAKER_08: In the sub-Sahara, where you're having terrible droughts now, you have nomadic tribesmen who can no longer graze their herds where they did.
6:44
SPEAKER_08: They're moving into some of the cities that don't have the infrastructure to handle them, where you don't have jobs for them.
6:53
SPEAKER_08: A lot of them are younger people, and that's where Al-Shabaab, Al-Qaeda, ISIS go to recruit.
7:00
SPEAKER_08: And that has a big impact on us.
7:02
SPEAKER_08: When you have major storms around the world, not just here in the United States, but anywhere, we respond.
7:08
SPEAKER_08: And that that means that our military has to look on their deployment and how what they need in the way of troops and where they're going to deploy them.
7:17
SPEAKER_08: As we see the Arctic start to open up, and in fact, the Arctic is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world.
7:26
SPEAKER_08: Uh now you have the Russians who have starting to stake claim to the oil and gas and the minerals that are under, that are opening up in the Bering Sea.
7:36
SPEAKER_08: The Chinese are there, the Koreans, North Koreans are starting to move there too.
7:42
SPEAKER_08: So there, and you know, while we get along well with Canada, they're staking claims as well.
7:48
SPEAKER_08: And and that has, again, real implications for us as a nation, for our economy, and for the military.
7:56
SPEAKER_08: Right now, um the Coast Guard has two cutters, icebreakers.
8:02
SPEAKER_08: Two icebreakers.
8:03
SPEAKER_08: They cover the Arctic and the Antarctic.
8:06
SPEAKER_08: Only one is is set for dealing with the big ice.
8:12
SPEAKER_08: The other one is uh for a lighter ice flow.
8:14
SPEAKER_08: If something happens in the Arctic and it's down in the Antarctic, it's not going to get there in time.
8:20
SPEAKER_08: And as you have more and more of the cruise ships going through the Bering Sea, they're gonna be.
8:28
SPEAKER_08: I mean, we don't have there there are no uh places, once you get north of uh Anchorage, there are no places for those ships to put in.
8:38
SPEAKER_08: If they run into trouble, we're all gonna be in trouble.
8:41
SPEAKER_08: And in fact, we've had to call on other nations to help.
8:45
SPEAKER_08: I mean, right now the Russians have some 17 icebreakers.
8:49
SPEAKER_08: Uh the rest of the the world has them, we don't.
8:52
SPEAKER_08: Uh we're starting to deal with that issue, but it's been a budgetary concern and put on the back burner.
8:58
SPEAKER_08: Anyway, all these things lead to it being a very much uh national security issue as well as being an environmental issue and an economic issue for us.
9:08
SPEAKER_06: Okay, thank you.
9:11
SPEAKER_06: So many scientists say, in fact, most scientists who are experts in the area of climate, that if we continue on our current path of emissions, that the world we will leave to our children and grandchildren will be much less hospitable.
9:32
SPEAKER_06: Could you talk a little bit about the areas that will be less hospitable for our children?
9:40
SPEAKER_06: And do you think that's reasonable or do you find that statement somewhat illuminate?
9:46
SPEAKER_08: Well, the thing about climate change we have to understand it's not going to be all bad for everybody.
9:50
SPEAKER_08: Things will change.
9:51
SPEAKER_08: There'll be some areas of the world where you will now have an ability to um actually grow crops, which you couldn't before.
9:58
SPEAKER_08: You will have other areas where you won't and where you used to.
10:01
SPEAKER_08: I mean, Great Britain won the an international award for the best champagne a few years ago, and that's because when with temperatures rising, you've got to go up, and there's no up.
10:15
SPEAKER_08: So what you do is you go over to southern Great Britain, and so that's where the wine production is starting to go and the champagne production is starting to go.
10:23
SPEAKER_08: So they'll do better.
10:25
SPEAKER_08: The French aren't so happy, but the Brits will do better.
10:28
SPEAKER_08: So it's not going to be a clear, even uh impact.
10:32
SPEAKER_08: But certainly for us, I go back to a basic because the climate change debate in and of itself has become so polarized and so political rather than based on policy that I look on it also as, hey, we're talking about clean air.
10:46
SPEAKER_08: You know, let's understand that the emissions are emissions that we're putting into the atmosphere aren't good for us.
10:53
SPEAKER_08: The Supreme Court has upheld the endangerment finding of the Environmental Protection Agency saying CO2 is bad for human health.
11:01
SPEAKER_08: It can cause cancer.
11:02
SPEAKER_08: We don't want it in our air.
11:04
SPEAKER_08: There are 200,000 people a year in this country who die of dirty airborne-related causes.
11:11
SPEAKER_08: We ought to be caring about that.
11:13
SPEAKER_08: And even if you don't want to believe in climate change or humans' involvement with climate change, at least let's clean up the air.
11:20
SPEAKER_08: And guess what?
11:21
SPEAKER_08: By doing that, we'll also start to have a positive impact on the rate of climate change.
11:26
SPEAKER_08: We also we have to understand we're not going to stop climate change.
11:30
SPEAKER_08: It's a natural phenomenon.
11:31
SPEAKER_08: The earth has been changing since it, the climate's been, the earth's been changing since it was formed.
11:35
SPEAKER_08: There was an ice age, we weren't around to mess that one up and it's gone away.
11:39
SPEAKER_08: But our activity is so exacerbating a natural phenomenon that nature can no longer absorb it in the way that it has.
11:48
SPEAKER_08: And what we should be doing is trying to do everything we can to slow it down so that we can prepare for what's coming at us.
11:55
SPEAKER_08: We see it and we're we're living it.
11:58
SPEAKER_08: And that's why any poll that you take in the United States today shows that better than 50% of the American people believe the climate change is occurring, believe that humans have a role to play in this, and believe we should be doing something about it.
12:11
SPEAKER_08: But they're very quiet because it to them it's such a big issue.
12:16
SPEAKER_08: What can I do as one individual?
12:18
SPEAKER_08: And what's it going to mean for me economically if we suddenly decide we're going to take this on?
12:23
SPEAKER_06: Oh, what a great segue.
12:27
SPEAKER_06: Let's focus a bit more on the economic equation about climate change.
12:31
SPEAKER_06: Conservative funds say that it's too expensive to take action on it.
12:35
SPEAKER_06: Yet many studies in the financial sector, including from Citigroup, say the opposite.
12:40
SPEAKER_06: And former Republican cabinet secretaries such as James Baker, George Schultz, and Hank Paulson say that it's just good risk management to take care of climate change.
12:49
SPEAKER_06: Where do you fall on this question of action versus inaction?
12:54
SPEAKER_08: I'm clearly on the side of action.
12:56
SPEAKER_08: I obviously support those other that you mentioned, the secretaries of state.
13:01
SPEAKER_08: And there are two things to think about when we think about that.
13:05
SPEAKER_08: From 1985 to 2012, we in this country saw better than 30% growth in population, a better than 25% increase in our power demand, our real GDP, our GDP in real dollars more than doubled, and yet we were able to reduce the six criteria air pollutants by over 67%.
13:26
SPEAKER_08: More people, more energy usage, thriving economy, and we were able to make good environmental progress.
13:34
SPEAKER_08: So to phrase this thing as a zero-sum game, it's either or is just wrong, and we've proven that again and again.
13:41
SPEAKER_08: We've also seen in the latest studies that just from the past three major hurricanes that we've seen, and the some 76 fires in wildfires in nine states over the last three months, that is going to cost us$300 billion.
13:58
SPEAKER_08: To put that in perspective, that's enough money to pay for free tuition for every student in every public university and college for four years.
14:10
SPEAKER_08: I mean, if you think about and what we're looking at in the next decade, if we don't do something and we keep going the way we're going, we're looking at some$360 billion a year in costs and rebuilding and human, and that's not even talking about human life and what it's doing to human life when you see people losing their lives and losing their homes and everything that they've ever had.
14:32
SPEAKER_08: And of course, those numbers, the 300 billion didn't include Puerto Rico.
14:40
SPEAKER_08: So it's from that perspective, doing nothing doesn't make a whole lot of sense because right now it's costing us so much.
14:47
SPEAKER_08: I'm one of those that sort of argues I don't know why the federal government is in the insurance business, but I do blame a little bit of this on the flood insurance because it's just encouraging people to rebuild right where they were, in exactly the way they did.
15:01
SPEAKER_08: And while I am more than happy and I believe it's a responsibility of the government to be there for people when bad things happen, to help them, to help them find housing, to help them get housing, I don't want to have I don't want to be responsible for having them build just the way they did before, right where they were before, because this is going to happen again and again.
15:20
SPEAKER_06: So going forward, you see it getting more expensive?
15:23
SPEAKER_08: Absolutely, because we are building bigger houses, more expensive houses, in places where they shouldn't be.
15:30
SPEAKER_06: And what about the fact that sea level rise is causing more damage because of the sea surge?
15:35
SPEAKER_06: So that's not just that the houses are there, but that the damage is more pervasive because of the sea level surge.
15:41
SPEAKER_08: And every time you get a big sea, a big surge, that changes the vegetation, so the next surge is even goes even further in.
15:49
SPEAKER_08: And right now, I mean, you see it in Florida and Miami with the king tide, which is uh high tide on a full moon, they'll have fish in their parking lots.
15:58
SPEAKER_08: I mean, it's happening now.
16:00
SPEAKER_08: And in Alaska, the challenge that we face is you've got Native American and Alaskan tribes up there that have to, they can't live where they've been live the way they have been living right now because um they can't pass down the generational understanding of what their culture is because they can't tell their children to go out on the ice floes anymore because they can't trust the ice flows.
16:25
SPEAKER_08: They're not thick enough.
16:26
SPEAKER_08: And the movement of both the the whales and also of the walrus make it that they're going further and further out.
16:33
SPEAKER_08: So they're having to change culturally their whole lives.
16:36
SPEAKER_08: But you've got seven villages right now that have agreed to move and are in the process of moving, and another about 14 that have got to be moved sooner rather than later.
16:46
SPEAKER_08: And the challenge is, okay, that's great.
16:48
SPEAKER_08: Where do you move them?
16:49
SPEAKER_08: How do you move them?
16:50
SPEAKER_08: What do you move?
16:51
SPEAKER_08: Do you move the hospital first or the grocery store?
16:53
SPEAKER_08: Or is it the houses or the church?
16:55
SPEAKER_08: And once you get them there, what's the infrastructure to them?
16:59
SPEAKER_08: Because there's not a whole lot up there in central Alaska and northern central Alaska.
17:03
SPEAKER_08: And how do you get food to them?
17:05
SPEAKER_08: I mean, you can see what's happening in Puerto Rico with the inability to get food and energy to people.
17:11
SPEAKER_08: Same thing with Alaska, it's just not a given that you can plop somebody down somewhere in the middle of northern Alaska and have them have the infrastructure that will allow them to uh succeed.
17:24
SPEAKER_06: So you're talking about that, um, I'm from New Orleans.
17:28
SPEAKER_06: So Louisiana had the first climate refugees where they moved out an entire town.
17:34
SPEAKER_06: Um, but it seems to me that as we look at sea level rise and with the projection being worst case somewhere between six and eight feet by end of century, that the number of Americans that need to be relocated.
17:49
SPEAKER_06: Um, the numbers, okay, everybody turn off your phones.
17:56
SPEAKER_06: Timeout.
17:59
SPEAKER_06: Um, can I tell you one time I did this and it was Michael?
18:08
SPEAKER_06: So bad.
18:09
SPEAKER_06: Um so when you see the numbers of 14 million Americans potentially being affected by sea level rise, and you see our great cities like New Orleans being one of the first, but also New York and Miami, um there's a point where you cannot relocate.
18:28
SPEAKER_06: Right.
18:29
SPEAKER_06: And the costs are astronomical.
18:31
SPEAKER_06: And I feel like there hasn't been as much discussion of that amongst the general population as amongst those who are watching it closely.
18:39
SPEAKER_06: Is there a way of raising awareness of these costs and these dangers in a way that wakes people up without turning them off?
18:47
SPEAKER_08: Well, I would have thought these last few storms would have done that.
18:50
SPEAKER_08: And that's why I I I think you do see it.
18:53
SPEAKER_08: People do get it.
18:53
SPEAKER_08: That's why you see that better than 50% of them believe that something's happening and that uh we're we have a role to play here and we should be doing something about it.
19:01
SPEAKER_08: The big qu question and the big hurdle is the logistics.
19:04
SPEAKER_08: How do you do it?
19:04
SPEAKER_08: I mean, we have 127 miles of beaches in New Jersey, and we have a lot of communities that have been there for generations, hundreds of years.
19:13
SPEAKER_08: And you can't go into them and say, sorry, you can't be here anymore.
19:17
SPEAKER_08: But it's going to be what's going to happen is after you have the kinds of things that we saw from Superstorm Sandy, you're going to say, Well, you can't rebuild the way you were rebuilding.
19:26
SPEAKER_08: And if you want to be right where you were before, that's fine, but we're not going to cover you with insurance.
19:30
SPEAKER_08: It's going to be on you.
19:32
SPEAKER_08: And we're going to have to find ways of building groins, being to do what we can hydraulically to try to protect the shoreline areas that we have, but you can't hold back Mother Nature forever.
19:47
SPEAKER_08: And we found that on the Mississippi, we found that on the Colorado.
19:50
SPEAKER_08: Um you see it over and over again where human hubris says, Oh, we'll control Mother Nature, and no, she has other thoughts.
19:57
SPEAKER_08: I mean, my husband grew up in in New York City, and he, of course, wasn't here for superstorm Sandy, which he managed to avoid most of those big crises.
20:05
SPEAKER_08: And anybody before he left, we would all talk about it.
20:07
SPEAKER_08: He said, Oh, New York's never gonna flood.
20:09
SPEAKER_08: New York's never flooded.
20:11
SPEAKER_08: Subways aren't gonna flood.
20:12
SPEAKER_08: Guess what?
20:13
SPEAKER_08: I mean, this was something that nobody who lived there could conceive of actually happening, and it did.
20:20
SPEAKER_08: And what it does tell us is that this sea level rise and the storm surges are real, and we've got to start planning, taking seriously the planning that's necessary to go into protecting ourselves better.
20:33
SPEAKER_08: Because that's gonna be part of it.
20:34
SPEAKER_08: Because as I said before, we're not gonna stop climate change.
20:37
SPEAKER_08: That's just not something we're gonna be able to do, but we can slow it.
20:42
SPEAKER_06: Okay, then let's move on to section two when we start to talk a little bit about the politics around this issue.
20:50
SPEAKER_06: You know we had to, right?
20:52
SPEAKER_06: Um so President Reagan, with a little note from Margaret Thatcher, because she was a scientist or a chemist, as they say in Britain, George H.
21:00
SPEAKER_06: Bush and George W.
21:01
SPEAKER_06: Bush all recognized the reality of climate change.
21:04
SPEAKER_06: In fact, it was on both parties' platform in 2008.
21:09
SPEAKER_06: Different ways of addressing it, but agreeing that it needed to be addressed.
21:14
SPEAKER_06: Fast forward to today, the Republican Party is the only large conservative party in the democratically elected world that denies the existence of climate change.
21:24
SPEAKER_06: How did we get well?
21:26
SPEAKER_08: First of all, in the George W.
21:28
SPEAKER_08: Bush's administration in 1943, it was in the platform.
21:32
SPEAKER_08: He, as a governor of Texas, had put a cap on carbon, but um not everybody in the administration was in sync with that, uh, particularly the vice president and many of those who were in control, Republicans controlled the Senate and the House, were also not in sync with it.
21:46
SPEAKER_08: And so the commitment to doing anything fell back a lot.
21:52
SPEAKER_08: Um we didn't we walked away from the uh Kyoto Protocol, which we were gonna do anyway.
21:58
SPEAKER_08: I mean, that that the thing.
22:00
SPEAKER_08: That Bill Clinton was going to do anything about that is a Schmerop.
22:05
SPEAKER_08: I mean, he didn't even bother to send it up to the Senate because they'd done a preliminary vote and they'd gotten uh and they a preliminary vote and it was 91 to nothing against it.
22:17
SPEAKER_08: So the Democrats didn't believe that the Kyoto Protocol was the way to go and that it did need to be worked on, which I felt as a governor the same way, that it was the right movement, but not the vehicle itself.
22:30
SPEAKER_08: It was not the right, hadn't been done the right way.
22:33
SPEAKER_08: And actually, when we and the and Bush 43 walked away from the Kyoto Protocol in the way we did, the only country at that point, the only developed country that had actually ratified Kyoto was Romania.
22:47
SPEAKER_08: The way we did it, though, unfortunately, was so in your face because it wasn't just we're not going to uh support the Kyoto Protocol.
22:56
SPEAKER_08: And so, oh, by the way, we don't care about any of this.
22:58
SPEAKER_08: And just because you guys have been working the last 20 years, 30 years at that point, and you think this is really in their face that it forced them all to start adopting it.
23:07
SPEAKER_08: And I am firmly of the belief that the rest of the world was sort of waiting for us to say, yes, we're going to do something about this.
23:14
SPEAKER_08: Yes, we believe that we need to be engaged and we need to cap carbon, but we want to work further on the protocol itself, and they would have fallen right into line with that.
23:23
SPEAKER_08: I think they recognized that you really couldn't have the kind of long-term positive impact without including China and India to a more robust degree than was in the original protocol and the other developing nations.
23:37
SPEAKER_08: And their pushback, because the very first uh international G8 meeting that I went to of my counterparts, was that they thought it was a fake.
23:48
SPEAKER_08: It was a way for the developed nations to keep the developing nations from getting economic parity, because we're the ones who'd messed up the environment by uh using so much coal and putting so much into the atmosphere, and we just didn't want them to be able to compete with us.
24:03
SPEAKER_08: Now they recognize and it's not exactly the case, and this is something that's really important, which is how you come to the Paris Accord with almost 200 uh countries signing on to that.
24:13
SPEAKER_08: But what's happened politically, I believe, is that it's it's part of the whole problem with government right now, where everything is looked at through the partisan political prism rather than through the policy prism.
24:26
SPEAKER_08: It's not about how do you solve a problem, it's how do you get more votes in your next election and how do you get another vote in your caucus.
24:34
SPEAKER_08: And that's where the focus is.
24:36
SPEAKER_08: And regulation is easy to hate.
24:39
SPEAKER_08: I mean, we address uh climate change through regulation, and that causes people to change their behavior or spend money for a problem they may not think exists.
24:48
SPEAKER_08: And so it's really easy to hate it.
24:50
SPEAKER_08: And the Republicans have now adopted this attitude that you can't have any regulation from government because government's bad.
24:56
SPEAKER_08: Big government is just bad, period, the end.
24:59
SPEAKER_08: And of all the promises that this president made during the campaign, one that's gonna that's the easiest for him to keep on and to stay with is rolling back regulation because he believes in it, his base uh loves it, and that's going to be where he's gonna continue, I believe, to uh do bad things for the environment.
25:21
SPEAKER_08: But it's become now a matter of course, we also set it up.
25:25
SPEAKER_08: The language that we use just generally politically has gotten to the point where we don't talk about defeating an enemy, uh defeating the other party, we talk about burying an enemy.
25:38
SPEAKER_08: Um, if you're not with me, you're against me, and there's no ability to to come together.
25:45
SPEAKER_08: The idea that you can compromise is a bad word.
25:47
SPEAKER_08: I was told that right at the beginning when I did my courtesy hearings of the Senate on the Hill, never use the word compromise because they tested it out.
25:55
SPEAKER_08: And whoever you say it to, doesn't matter which side of the issue they're on, they immediately think they've lost something.
26:01
SPEAKER_08: They don't know what, but they've lost something.
26:04
SPEAKER_08: So consensus, I kind of like consensus.
26:06
SPEAKER_08: And if anybody knows anything about the history of our country, we wouldn't be here without that.
26:12
SPEAKER_08: And I keep saying to these people who wrap themselves so in um patriotism and all, I said, if you don't think that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson didn't fundamentally disagree on a whole lot of issues, then you haven't read your history.
26:28
SPEAKER_08: And yet they were able to find consensus without compromising on their very basic principles.
26:35
SPEAKER_08: And that's how we got the Constitution in the wonderful country in which we live.
26:40
SPEAKER_08: There's something now that just it's too complex.
26:44
SPEAKER_08: People want simple answers.
26:46
SPEAKER_08: They want to uh be told, here's one enemy, we go after them, everything is all right, and here's one action, if we take it, we'll solve all the problems.
26:55
SPEAKER_08: And unfortunately, that's what uh people are being fed.
27:00
SPEAKER_08: And oh, by the way, the Democrats are getting as bad on the other side.
27:03
SPEAKER_08: I mean, you're either four of you either believe in climate change or you don't.
27:06
SPEAKER_08: There's no middle ground.
27:08
SPEAKER_08: You believe humans cause it, or you don't believe humans have any role to play.
27:11
SPEAKER_08: And again, as with almost any issue, I can't think of a one that isn't a whole lot more nuanced than that.
27:18
SPEAKER_08: And so it's not that either or, and that's the way it's been projected.
27:22
SPEAKER_08: And then of course, when it was first start, when we first started really talking about it, we said it was global warming, which scientifically it is at the basis of it, but because Mother Nature doesn't do things in straight lines, there were times when we had very cold weather, and that's why Jim and Hoff could take a snowball under the floor of the Senate and throw it at somebody.
27:45
SPEAKER_08: You know, and it made it very easy for the naysayers to say, Oh, this is ridiculous.
27:50
SPEAKER_08: Tell me about global warming when it's been so cold.
27:53
SPEAKER_08: So it's it that's what makes it so difficult for people to understand and so easy for them to be led into the we don't have anything to do with this and this is all a hoax.
28:04
SPEAKER_06: So let me follow up on that because it's been intriguing to me to watch the different constituencies here.
28:10
SPEAKER_06: Um, the military has come out very vocally saying climate change is a threat, magnifier and multiplier.
28:16
SPEAKER_06: It is hurting their ability to keep us fit.
28:19
SPEAKER_06: And this new Secretary of Defense is perhaps the furthest out there of any, which is kind of unusual.
28:26
SPEAKER_06: Um we've had religious leaders of all the major banks, including some very vocal evangelicals, come forward and say that dealing with climate change is a moral issue.
28:37
SPEAKER_06: And we have had businesses, especially multinational businesses, still on the record on their websites and in their annual report saying climate change is hurting their ability to produce their product and provide value to their show.
28:53
SPEAKER_06: We have the majority of Americans, including Republicans, believing climate change is happening.
28:58
SPEAKER_06: We have the vast majority believing we should do stuff to reduce carbon pollution and renewable energy, and yet we're not really seeing the movement.
29:07
SPEAKER_06: These are the polls that in the past I would have imagined would have caused the political system to work.
29:13
SPEAKER_06: It's not is it is it working or is it my misimpression?
29:17
SPEAKER_08: No, it's it's it's not working, but I will tell you something.
29:20
SPEAKER_08: Um, with all due respect, people who believe that we ought to be engaging this issue to one degree or another are sitting in rooms like this talking to each other.
29:29
SPEAKER_08: And we none of us vote in the House and Senate.
29:34
SPEAKER_08: And that's where the problem lies.
29:36
SPEAKER_08: Because those members, for instance, of the Republican Party that want to believe, that do believe that we should be engaged in climate change, and there is now a bipartisan group of climate believers, Republicans and Democrats, in the House.
29:48
SPEAKER_08: There's also the problem solvers caucus in the House and Senate, again, Republicans and Democrats, who are working together who will say we will cross party lines and we will stand up on these issues.
30:00
SPEAKER_08: The problem they have is the minute they do that, the minute they take on their leadership, they're going to get primary.
30:07
SPEAKER_08: The Democrats from the left and the Republicans from the right.
30:10
SPEAKER_08: And up till now, there's been nobody there saying we've got your back.
30:15
SPEAKER_08: And so one of the things that No Labels organization, with which I've been involved for a while, is doing is raising a$50 million pack to say to these people, we'll be there for you.
30:25
SPEAKER_08: You stand up on these issues, we will we will help you in your primaries because the way the districts are written now, drawn now, we don't need to go beyond the primaries.
30:36
SPEAKER_08: That's it.
30:38
SPEAKER_08: Primary, you win your primary, you're you're it.
30:41
SPEAKER_08: So uh we've got to do more of that.
30:43
SPEAKER_08: We've got to engage more and let our elected officials know, hey, we really do care about this issue.
30:47
SPEAKER_08: We may not all agree to what lengths we should go to try to deal with it, but we agree we ought to be talking about it.
30:55
SPEAKER_08: We ought to be talking about our energy.
30:57
SPEAKER_08: What are our energy sources?
30:59
SPEAKER_08: How are we gonna get our energy?
31:00
SPEAKER_08: Uh, how are we gonna address these challenges that are coming at us, and how can we do it in an environmentally sustainable way?
31:08
SPEAKER_08: Because sustainability just means having it there for the next generation.
31:12
SPEAKER_08: And um, you know, the Native American saying of we don't inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children is very, very true.
31:21
SPEAKER_08: And we need to think in those terms, but we're not really doing that now.
31:25
SPEAKER_06: I think we need a new word for sustainability.
31:28
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, it does it sounds like something that's onerous, right?
31:31
SPEAKER_06: Instead of saying it for our children.
31:33
SPEAKER_06: You're right, that's a very interesting thing.
31:35
SPEAKER_06: So let's talk a little bit about the recent op-ed this summer that you wrote in the New York Times.
31:41
SPEAKER_06: Um, in it, you were criticizing EPA administrator Scott Cruent for politicizing an agency that is supposed to be, quote, guided by science, unquote.
31:51
SPEAKER_06: You specifically criticized his plan to create an antagonistic red team of dissenting scientists to challenge established climate change research.
32:00
SPEAKER_06: Can you help us understand how climate change research is currently vetted and why you thought this was ill-advised?
32:08
SPEAKER_08: Well, first of all, you've got 97-98% of scientists who say that climate change is real and humans have a strong involvement with that and we need to take some action on it.
32:21
SPEAKER_08: And when you have that kind of lopsided understanding in the scientific community, even though they will always say there's more to learn, there's always more to learn, and science isn't constantly evolving, when you go to those very few who do not uh, who are not the believers and elevate them to the same level as the, you take the 2% and elevate them to the same level as the 98%, uh, you're giving them coverage and exposure that they don't really, first of all, they don't deserve because most of their of what they've written has not been peer-reviewed.
32:57
SPEAKER_08: It's most of it is self-published.
32:59
SPEAKER_08: Uh it just doesn't rise to the same level as the majority of the rest of the scientists.
33:04
SPEAKER_08: And you've got to give them a platform that's gonna make it even more confusing for the public to understand what's going on.
33:11
SPEAKER_08: Because, you know, you can throw a whole lot of terms out and make it sound very credible and make it sound and make it confusing to people.
33:18
SPEAKER_08: And so I don't think that's that is the best way to spend our money at the Environmental Protection Agency.
33:24
SPEAKER_08: The Environmental Protection Agency is about protecting human health and the environment.
33:28
SPEAKER_08: And Scott Pruitt keeps saying we want to just get back to basics.
33:32
SPEAKER_08: On the one hand, well, he said after that op-ed he didn't like it because he wanted to get back to basics, and that wasn't climate change.
33:38
SPEAKER_08: So why are you spending money on a red team and a blue team and setting up this whole debate thing if it's not a real issue?
33:44
SPEAKER_08: And it's not getting back to basics.
33:46
SPEAKER_08: But of course, getting back to basics you can't do either with the budget that they're proposing and the cutbacks on things like superfund sites, which he acknowledges as one of the important basic responsibilities of the Environmental Protection Agency.
34:00
SPEAKER_08: So there are a whole lot of um, there are a whole lot of things that just don't track, um, that don't quite make sense on things that you say and things that you do.
34:09
SPEAKER_08: It's do what I do as I say, not as I do, kind of uh problem that we're in.
34:15
SPEAKER_08: But um it's I feel very strongly about the undermining of science.
34:20
SPEAKER_08: There's been kind of a dismissiveness of science.
34:22
SPEAKER_08: A lot of the science advisory boards at the agency have the science advisory boards to vet a lot of the uh specific regulations as we're moving through the process.
34:34
SPEAKER_08: And there's kind of an attitude there now that it's as if everybody at EPA gets up in the morning and says, Whose life can I mess up today?
34:42
SPEAKER_08: I think I'll make a regulation on that.
34:44
SPEAKER_08: It's not how regulations happen.
34:46
SPEAKER_08: They're based on science.
34:47
SPEAKER_08: They have to go through a long period, but you have to justify where you're setting the numbers, uh, what has led you to believe that this is an issue on which the agency must be heard.
34:59
SPEAKER_08: And then you have to publish a you go out with a potential rulemaking, and everybody gets to comment on that.
35:05
SPEAKER_08: You have to respond to every single comment, and on some of the bigger ones, you get over a thousand comments, and you have to respond to all of them, and you have to determine what kind of changes you need to make and what the legitimacy is of an issue that's brought forward.
35:19
SPEAKER_08: Those regulations always change, then you go to final.
35:23
SPEAKER_08: And it's it takes a long time, and it's got to be based on science.
35:27
SPEAKER_08: I mean, the politics can do it, of course.
35:30
SPEAKER_08: Uh, when the EPA was set up and Congress determined it's it's been proscribed, the enabling legislation is very strict, and there's certain parts of it, for instance, on the clean air, on air.
35:43
SPEAKER_08: There's certain times when you can look at cost-benefit analysis, other times when you must, and yet a third group where you may not look at cost-benefit analysis.
35:53
SPEAKER_08: Now, how Congress figured this one out a long time ago, I don't know, because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
35:58
SPEAKER_08: But um, those are the kinds of things that hamper the agency's ability to do things.
36:05
SPEAKER_08: But still, it's uh there is that political part of it always because you're affecting human life.
36:10
SPEAKER_08: So you've got to, what's the trade-off?
36:12
SPEAKER_08: You know, how much can you accept?
36:14
SPEAKER_08: It's like saying how much arsenic can a human body ingest.
36:19
SPEAKER_08: Well, there's a big difference between the way children metabolize and the way adults metabolize or take lead.
36:26
SPEAKER_08: Same thing.
36:27
SPEAKER_08: Um we you've got to know that, you've got to understand what's right, and because every time you you decide that you've got to raise the level of what's acceptable, you cost a whole lot more money in a whole lot of different places.
36:40
SPEAKER_08: And because our country is so diverse, taking the instance of arsenic, arsenic is not a big problem naturally occurring here in New Jersey.
36:50
SPEAKER_08: I'd already lowered it to 10% per billion when I was governor.
36:55
SPEAKER_08: When we were talking about doing it at the EPA, which we which we did, in the Southwest, it's naturally occurring at a much higher level.
37:05
SPEAKER_08: And so it's a question of health.
37:08
SPEAKER_08: What is safe?
37:08
SPEAKER_08: Is 10 parts per billion safe?
37:10
SPEAKER_08: If anybody, if a scientist would just had ever told me at 10 parts you you're fine, at 11 you die, it's really easy for me to pull up with the regulation.
37:18
SPEAKER_08: I can set that.
37:19
SPEAKER_08: But when they're telling you anything from zero to 25 parts per billion is okay, and every five parts brings in a whole nother part of the country and a whole nother subset of utilities and things, which is gonna cost them a lot more money to reach that, you have to stop and think.
37:38
SPEAKER_08: And so it gets very complicated, but the agency is is controlled by a by a lot of the regulation, so it's got to be based on science.
37:47
SPEAKER_08: You cannot just say, I think.
37:50
SPEAKER_08: You've got to say, this is based on science, this is in the does the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and what can we do to help those who are not going to be helped by this?
37:59
SPEAKER_06: Thank you.
38:00
SPEAKER_06: So I'm gonna jump to section three because time is a sticking through our finger.
38:06
SPEAKER_06: Um and that is looking at actions I can help us.
38:11
SPEAKER_06: Conservative leaders such as James Baker, Hank Dawson, and George Schultz have all come forward to say that climate change needs to be addressed and can be through conservative principles.
38:21
SPEAKER_06: Specifically, they endorse a fee on that.
38:24
SPEAKER_06: This would use market forces to lower emissions, replace regulation, and would not go to government as all monies are returned as a dividend or to offset other taxes.
38:33
SPEAKER_06: Do you support the carbon fee or do you believe other policies would be more or equally effective?
38:40
SPEAKER_08: We are such a bottom line-driven society that frankly I think a tax on carbon is the best way to go.
38:47
SPEAKER_08: It's the cleanest way to go, it's the it's the most straightforward way to go, and you can make it so that is you are returning money to people and putting it in their pockets, but it would change behavior if you knew you were spending a little bit more because the carbon used to produce whatever that particular product was, uh you'd think twice.
39:06
SPEAKER_08: It's like looking, I I look now at at car manufacturers, and they're in the big fight now with EPA over the gas mileage.
39:15
SPEAKER_08: Because every time you have any kind of a of a problem where you've knocked out some of the flow of natural gas and oil, and gasoline prices go up, everybody rushes to get their Prius and their smaller car.
39:30
SPEAKER_08: The minute gas prices go down, they're back into the SUVs and the big trucks.
39:34
SPEAKER_08: And I always used to marvel in Florida at people driving Humvees, thinking, okay, where do you need that exactly here?
39:40
SPEAKER_08: There's not big mountains and they're not a whole lot of snowstorms.
39:44
SPEAKER_08: But you know, we just we do those kinds of things.
39:47
SPEAKER_08: So we are so market-sensitive that I really think a carbon tax is the best way to go.
39:53
SPEAKER_08: Um, carbon trading, and I was part of the Chicago Climate Exchange, which a long time ago put in a carbon trading program, is complicated.
40:04
SPEAKER_08: It's uh difficult to do and administer.
40:07
SPEAKER_08: Unfortunately, when they first did it in the European Union and Great Britain, they sold more credits than there was there was being produced, and that threw the whole market off.
40:16
SPEAKER_08: And so it hasn't had a good history, which is why I would support a uh a tax on carbon if you make it revenue neutral, so that you're returning the money in other ways to the taxpayer.
40:28
SPEAKER_08: And I really believe you could sell that.
40:32
SPEAKER_06: Okay, guys, I'm showing forbearance.
40:34
SPEAKER_06: I'm gonna stop with my questions, even though I have 45 more.
40:55
SPEAKER_02: First, I'd like to thank our hostess and our host and Sea Change for creating this extraordinary evening.
41:01
SPEAKER_02: And I want to thank you for your service, Matthew.
41:03
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
41:04
SPEAKER_02: Uh this is very personal to me.
41:05
SPEAKER_02: In December of 1970, Bill Ruckleshaus' driver, Jim Beard, and myself literally physically opened the door to CBA on the first day.
41:14
SPEAKER_02: And I've waited a long time to have the pleasure of meeting you because you're a hero and you deserve the Bill Ruckelshaus is the hero.
41:21
SPEAKER_08: He's a wonderful man.
41:23
SPEAKER_02: There are a bunch of heroes out there.
41:24
SPEAKER_02: Well, my question to you, my background is our politics, in business.
41:29
SPEAKER_02: And I see this as a political issue.
41:31
SPEAKER_02: I think you can have leadership at any level of government, but if you don't have the political will to support that leadership, then that leadership has great limits on how far they can move the ball.
41:43
SPEAKER_02: And in this case, um everybody, mentioned, we're talking to ourselves.
41:48
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the guys in this room, the women in this room, all get the fact that there are islands disappearing in the polynomial, there are polar bears on ice caps, and Native Americans that have to get up there.
42:03
SPEAKER_02: And they get that coral heads full in shape.
42:06
SPEAKER_02: But there are a great number of people with a critical mass out there who don't get.
42:13
SPEAKER_02: And I believe that we have to get to those people before we're going to have any kind of change and support our leader.
42:20
SPEAKER_02: Now, I don't know, like many of you, I spent hours and hours and hours trans.
42:28
SPEAKER_02: And the devastation, unprecedented devastation that suffering that those storms put it on Americans and on people of other nationality.
42:37
SPEAKER_02: It was a wonderful teaching moment.
42:40
SPEAKER_02: But if you watch every one of those newsbooks, and I start my mornings at BBC, then I go to CNN, then I go to MSNBC, and then I go to Fox, and the Wall Street Journal, and WAPO.
42:53
SPEAKER_02: I try to cover them.
42:55
SPEAKER_02: In those hours of discussion, there was not one mention of any kind of prevention that could have mitigated.
43:04
SPEAKER_02: None, not a single minute.
43:06
SPEAKER_02: It was all about disaster relief.
43:08
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's emblematic of this whole issue.
43:12
SPEAKER_02: We're caught in a cycle of the national government of looking at each one of these individual disasters as kind of solitary, isolated.
43:23
SPEAKER_02: And in the old reality, that's what they were.
43:25
SPEAKER_02: But now, in the last 10 years, we've had 12 out of the last 13 most costly swarms since 2004.
43:34
SPEAKER_02: 11 out of the 12 13 most costly swarms in the United States.
43:38
SPEAKER_02: And these have to be viewed as symptomatic of a larger problem.
43:42
SPEAKER_02: So in this coverage, everybody was a victim.
43:45
SPEAKER_02: Everybody was a victim.
43:46
SPEAKER_02: How do you get to the media and uh and get through to them in a way that they're going to respond not to those people in this room all the time?
43:56
SPEAKER_02: We're talking about the loss of American lives, American properties, the loss of
44:15
SPEAKER_06: Okay, so I've been told that my job is to repeat the question.
44:23
SPEAKER_08: How do we get the media to take up the right?
44:27
SPEAKER_08: Thank you.
44:28
SPEAKER_08: And that's a tough one.
44:29
SPEAKER_08: But I'll tell you, um, you know, if you start to think outside the box, we did this when we were looking at nutrient trading at EPA for water.
44:37
SPEAKER_08: And what we discovered in looking at the news is people spend the most time in the news, they concentrate the most on the weather, because that affects them.
44:45
SPEAKER_08: You know, am I going to be able to have a picnic tomorrow?
44:46
SPEAKER_08: Do I have to take an umbrella?
44:48
SPEAKER_08: All this kind of thing.
44:49
SPEAKER_08: So we went to the Meteorological Association and we said, look, when you're seeing a big storm, can we get you and get you to get the meteorologist to say to people, look, believe it or not, even if you don't live on a river, you live in a watershed.
45:05
SPEAKER_08: And it's going to be a big rain tomorrow, so it's not a good day to go out and fertilize your lawn or to put extra pesticide on because it's going to wash away and it's going to go into this storm drain and that's going to drain into this river.
45:16
SPEAKER_08: And we had two, we were piloting it in Virginia and Maryland, and it was being quite successful, but the subsequent administration didn't want to continue with it.
45:27
SPEAKER_08: And we have to start thinking about ways like that to get to people, to, and to get to those.
45:33
SPEAKER_08: Actually, the news, the talking heads, right now it's all about ratings.
45:36
SPEAKER_08: So the more outrageous you are, the more ratings you get, unfortunately, because that's what we're telling them we want.
45:42
SPEAKER_08: So again, it comes back to us.
45:44
SPEAKER_08: It comes back to us saying and writing to the stations, emailing the stations, calling the stations, saying, we want to hear more about what this is costing us.
45:52
SPEAKER_08: We want you to ask the politicians, why haven't we taken more steps?
45:57
SPEAKER_08: We want to ask the politicians ourselves, what are we doing about rebuilding or prevention?
46:02
SPEAKER_08: We should also be looking at what is going to stay the same and where can we build, do something positive, not just the negative, but look at where we can actually build on what we already have and what we already know and keep things safer and keep people healthier.
46:25
SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
47:21
SPEAKER_08: Well, that's gonna be a tough one to do.
47:23
SPEAKER_08: Getting people to give up beef because of the methane release from cattle.
47:26
SPEAKER_08: I mean, it's been documented, it's true.
47:28
SPEAKER_08: Unfortunately, what we're also seeing, though, is with the uh the melting up of the permafrost in Alaska, there we have huge methane releases up there, and that's gonna be even uh more than trying to get people away from beef.
47:40
SPEAKER_08: But uh you do see a number of agricultural entities that are coming up with beef substitute projects.
47:46
SPEAKER_08: The problem with that is you have people on the other side who say we don't want GMOs.
47:50
SPEAKER_08: Nothing that's genetically modified is going to be healthy.
47:53
SPEAKER_08: We don't want any of that.
47:55
SPEAKER_08: So that's a debate as far as an approach to dealing with climate change that I think is going to be a tougher one to overcome.
48:03
SPEAKER_08: Some people will change for all sorts of different reasons, but I don't think as a government program we're gonna be able to expect much to happen there or to see that people are gonna take that up.
48:15
SPEAKER_08: And you know, you're certainly not gonna get it from any of the Midwestern or Western representatives.
48:20
SPEAKER_08: And that doesn't matter whether you're Republican or Democrat.
48:23
SPEAKER_08: That's gonna be who's your constituency.
48:25
SPEAKER_08: And if your constituency are cattle ranchers, it's just a little bit like having the ethanol in our gasoline.
48:32
SPEAKER_08: That does absolutely nothing for the environment.
48:34
SPEAKER_08: It's terrible for your car engine and it ruins the catalytic converters, but it's great for the corn growers, and that's why it's there.
48:42
SPEAKER_08: I mean, it's that simple.
48:43
SPEAKER_08: And so politics does play a role.
48:45
SPEAKER_08: So I have all the avenues to go down to try to address the issue of carbon, uh, that would be one I'd leave till further down the road.
48:55
SPEAKER_08: The good news is that you've got a lot of companies, uh, I'm on the board of one, that has already it's been doing this for quite a while now, has made very aggressive goals, set very aggressive goals to reduce their carbon output, their water usage.
49:09
SPEAKER_08: Um they are constantly upgrading it, and it's the whole pipeline.
49:12
SPEAKER_08: It's not just the company itself, it's all of their suppliers, and they're holding them to a higher standard.
49:17
SPEAKER_08: And in fact, um some of the other companies that have tossed me off because of my age also agreed with that.
49:23
SPEAKER_08: So it's happening.
49:25
SPEAKER_08: Our businesses are doing it, particularly the multinationals, because they've got to deal with the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is ahead of us on this issue, and they want to have harmony.
49:35
SPEAKER_08: It would be much easier for them if if everything was the same, if they had one set of regulations that they had to meet, then they'd know what to do and how to do it.
49:44
SPEAKER_08: And but they're going ahead anyway, and we're also seeing a lot of work being done at the state and state level and cities, municipal level as well, are taking up this cause, and that's where we're going to make a difference.
49:54
SPEAKER_08: It's when it happened when it's happening in your town.
49:57
SPEAKER_08: Um, actually, we have a my company has a client that's come to them.
50:02
SPEAKER_08: Um, I still don't quite get the economics behind it, but it's a professor from VU who's come up with a way to get an app on your phone that you can use.
50:11
SPEAKER_08: You put your credit card on it, and then you go.
50:13
SPEAKER_08: They have Eastern Mountain Sports, is one of the companies that has agreed to be part of this.
50:18
SPEAKER_08: For every dollar you spend, you get a carbon credit.
50:21
SPEAKER_08: That company buys a carbon credit or gets a carbon credit carbon taken away from them.
50:26
SPEAKER_08: I've got to work out, I've got to sit down and talk to this fellow a little bit more deeply.
50:30
SPEAKER_08: But what is nice about it, and the thing that I like is that it makes it easy for people to do the right thing.
50:37
SPEAKER_08: It's like buying Energy Star now.
50:40
SPEAKER_08: It used to be much harder because Energy Star products were cost more than their competitors.
50:46
SPEAKER_08: Now that their price is, you can get the same kind of price for an Energy Star product that is just as good as any other in the market, and it shows you right on it how much you save over the course of a year in electricity, people will do that.
50:59
SPEAKER_08: They will reach out, they'll even spend a little bit more, just not a lot, because they can't afford it.
51:04
SPEAKER_08: I mean, it's not that everybody has a discretionary income to be able to be as good stewards as they'd like to be.
51:10
SPEAKER_08: So anything you can do along that, whether it's uh what you buy with your credit card through this app or what, if we can come up with ways to make it easy for people to do the right thing, they'll do it.
51:23
SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: Governor Jim Waltman with the Steinbrook Watershed Association and thank you for your leadership.
51:29
SPEAKER_00: So as you started to say, a lot of states are taking action, red and blue states.
51:34
SPEAKER_00: Uh we're about to have an election, although there's not a lot of attention to it.
51:38
SPEAKER_00: We're going to elect the state's next governor.
51:41
SPEAKER_00: So I'm wondering what two or three things you you would hope our next governor would do to take action on this uh critical climate issue.
51:50
SPEAKER_08: Well, I would certainly ask them, and I'd hope that they'd be asked in the debates, what is their approach toward climate change?
51:57
SPEAKER_08: What is their approach to breaking down the silos between the various departments and agencies so that uh the Department of Community Affairs understands that what it does has a real impact on the Department of the Environment and vice versa, the same with the Department of Transportation.
52:11
SPEAKER_08: I mean, these things have got to be looked at holistically.
52:15
SPEAKER_08: And uh, in fact, there we had a uh governor's institute with this administration right at the very beginning of the administration, and and to give them credit, all their uh their cabinet members came, but there was no push behind it, unfortunately.
52:28
SPEAKER_08: It didn't continue forward, but it was a way to address these kinds of issues and start to break down those barriers that prevent the kind of broad-based planning that you need to have in order to address the issues.
52:40
SPEAKER_08: But you've got to bring it up and say this is important.
52:43
SPEAKER_08: We've got, as I said before, 127 miles of beaches.
52:46
SPEAKER_08: Uh shore tourism is a is a huge part of our economy.
52:50
SPEAKER_08: We want to keep that going.
52:51
SPEAKER_08: How do we ensure I'm sorry to see that we seem to have fallen back a little bit on the on our ocean clarity of the water, where uh storm sewer overflow, sanitary sewer overflow?
53:02
SPEAKER_08: Those are issues that are very local.
53:05
SPEAKER_08: Those are issues that have to be addressed by a combination of the state, the utilities, the local government, and unfortunately the ratepayers will pay into that too, but we're gonna have to do it.
53:15
SPEAKER_08: And we need to know are you taking these issues seriously?
53:18
SPEAKER_08: What are you doing about them?
53:19
SPEAKER_08: How are you planning to address them?
53:21
SPEAKER_08: How are you planning to address our energy needs?
53:24
SPEAKER_08: Um is there any, I would love to see, some action at the state level to allow the Board of Public Utilities to require the utilities to lay out a plan of what they see their energy demands being in the future and where that growth is going to take place.
53:41
SPEAKER_08: Right now the BPU cannot do that.
53:43
SPEAKER_08: It can't require that they do it.
53:45
SPEAKER_08: So therefore, we get pipelines going a whole lot of different places without a real understanding of the area for the next 10 years.
53:54
SPEAKER_08: And we need to think out beyond 10 years.
53:57
SPEAKER_08: We need to think longer than that, but at least that would be a start.
54:01
SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
54:01
SPEAKER_04: Any other questions?
54:13
SPEAKER_01: Republicans, and and thank you are pretty smart folks here in the room.
54:19
SPEAKER_01: We all nod and we say, you know, we shouldn't uh support the building and superstar any come up and we nodded yet.
54:27
SPEAKER_01: We have supersarms any and sure we've got like uh seeming like all of our legislators turn around as well as well, we should have our vacation homes.
54:51
SPEAKER_01: How can we say an educated state?
54:58
SPEAKER_08: No, you're absolutely right.
54:59
SPEAKER_08: Um the state did pass some regulations, but we should more put more pressure on them for the enforcement of those regulations.
55:07
SPEAKER_08: And the municipalities, some of the municipalities did step up and require the houses to be raised and required them to some more setbacks.
55:15
SPEAKER_08: But we're gonna have to support that because there are always people that are going to be hurt by it and are gonna have to can't spend the money, don't have the disposable income to jack up a house another four feet.
55:26
SPEAKER_08: Um, and we've got to understand that and figure out how do we help them do that kind of thing because that's so essential.
55:32
SPEAKER_08: And they're gonna have to, they'll benefit from it in the long run because they might still have a house if there's another big storm.
55:39
SPEAKER_08: But uh again, it comes back to us going after our local officials and going after our state leaders and saying, you know, we really do need this kind of uh legislation.
55:51
SPEAKER_08: Look at what Mayor Bloomberg, whether you like him or not, but some of the things he was able to do in New York City as far as rooftop gardens and uh walkways, if you don't think closing off those streets hasn't caused a huge backlash amongst a lot of people because of the traffic.
56:08
SPEAKER_08: And yet the quality of life, the people who enjoy that uh find it to be much better.
56:12
SPEAKER_08: And actually you're getting at it.
56:14
SPEAKER_08: An interesting thing is the other part of this whole equation that we don't think about a lot is land use.
56:20
SPEAKER_08: Because land use changes has had a much impact.
56:23
SPEAKER_08: Well, actually, there's a study that was by NAP that's about 10 years old now that said that you would have had to double the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere in the previous 300 years, which of course is including the Industrial Revolution, as the same impact on climate change as you've had from land use changes, from deforestation, from planting over things, uh, from paving over things, excuse me, and from the way we uh farming.
56:49
SPEAKER_08: So we've got to look at those things too, and those get back to what we can do in our towns and in our cities.
56:56
SPEAKER_08: Instead of having just a Macadam parking lot, let's have one that is porous and put, instead of having concrete bunkers to protect one car from the next, have a little open space where you can have some drainage.
57:07
SPEAKER_08: Mother Nature does a best much better job of cleaning up things than we do.
57:11
SPEAKER_08: When you start talking about them in those things in that way, uh a lot of people won't push back too hard.
57:18
SPEAKER_08: But you're right, and you think that in a state as educated as this, that we would understand that there are going to be some of these tough decisions that have to be made and you have to stick with them.
57:28
SPEAKER_08: But if we don't support those legislators that are willing to get, uh we can't rob them before the local mayor, and so if they're gonna be there for you, um they're likely their longevity in that position is severely handicapped, and we haven't been there for them in the way that we really need to do it.
57:52
SPEAKER_06: But I think we're gonna have this incident to thank the governor for my pleasure.
57:57
SPEAKER_08: Thank you for having us with coming up.
58:09
SPEAKER_06: I'd also like to introduce my colleague, Katie Kinsalve, who's gonna tell you a little bit about what's coming next for some time.
58:15
SPEAKER_03: I just I mean it's been so great to have you all here, and I just wanted to let you know that we've got some things coming up.
58:22
SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much.
58:22
SPEAKER_03: And thank you, Governor, for your time and your insights.
58:25
SPEAKER_03: That was just fantastic.
58:27
SPEAKER_03: Um we have another conversation the week after Thanksgiving.
58:32
SPEAKER_03: Peter Hoopa, who is the um leading the division of geo-risk research at Munich Ray, uh, the world's leading reinsurance company, is coming.
58:42
SPEAKER_03: Um, so there will be details about that hitting your email inboxes sometime soon.
58:48
SPEAKER_03: So keep an eye out for that.
58:50
SPEAKER_03: Um, we are also doing a couple more of Kathleen's wonderful primer presentations.
58:55
SPEAKER_03: If you haven't seen them, um try to make a you know make time to see them.
59:01
SPEAKER_03: One we have on the 19th is at Beetensbrook.
59:04
SPEAKER_03: If you want to be on the invitation list, please send us an email on the our email is on the sheet on your on your chair, so um that should be easy to do.
59:15
SPEAKER_03: Um, as I said, uh, well, I guess Catherine said, Kathleen is going around the country with this presentation.
59:22
SPEAKER_03: She has been requested to present it in places like Nashville, Dayton, Evanston, Illinois.
59:29
SPEAKER_03: So if you want to grab a chance to see her, um she's our own homegrown star, so really she really needs something.
59:42
SPEAKER_03: You never approve my copy.
59:45
SPEAKER_03: Um, I wanted to thank Catherine and Andrew and Absentia once again because this is um and and Governor Whitman, really.
1:00:01
SPEAKER_03: Uh I think everyone here is just so pleased to have been able to hear your thoughts on these issues.
1:00:08
SPEAKER_03: Um this is why we do see change conversations.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_03: We want to have conversations.
1:00:14
SPEAKER_03: We hope you will go out and have more conversations with people who may have different opinions about climate change.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_03: We don't always want to be talking to people who have the same views that we do.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_03: So that is why we started this organization.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_03: That's why we have a group that uh runs the political gamut from super liberal to conservative.
1:00:36
SPEAKER_03: We're trying to get everyone involved in this.
1:00:39
SPEAKER_03: So if you would like to support our efforts, once again we are a nonprofit and we are about to get our federal tax exempt status, but we are looking for support.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_03: There's a silver dish on the way or really just talk to us about ways to help and join our effort or come volunteer with us.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_03: We we would love to have you.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_03: So thank you so much.