Environmentalism 101: What you need to know to do your part

Description: Without wise leadership, even a crisis would not lead to effective action.

Transcript: Well, there are long-term changes that we need to think about.  I talk in the book a lot about this idea of deliberative democracy, of direct democracy if you will, of reclaiming politics for ourselves and moving away, in many respects, from representative government, which is so easily captured.  But I think in the shorter run, there's a lot that we need to do before can realize the longer-term objectives.  I mean, first there are a long list of political reforms that we need to be attending to.  You know, non-partisan congressional districts, the treaty among the states that moves us to direct election of the president by popular vote, getting money out of politics.  You know, those clean and fair elections that are publically financed.  The citizen right to the airwaves.  There are lots and lots of reforms that we need to make of our political system, I mean, just look at the primary mess that we are in today in our presidential elections.  And even in the voting in Pennsylvania, there were a lot of problems with people, you know, showing up and not being properly registered at the voting places.  So there's a long list of political reforms that need to be made.  In terms of environmental politics, I think the environmental community has been-- has badly neglected the electoral politics.  As I said, it's been a movement that focused on working the political system that's there.  We haven't focused on changing the political system itself, and including changing those in the political system who are elected.  And it's different from a lot of other concerns that our country is-- people have had in our country, but it has not been a strong force in electoral politics and we've got to change that.  It has been an isolated concern.  It has not built bridges to many other communities in our country.  And, you know, there's very little interaction or shared work between those who are concerned about environment, and those who are concerned about social justice, and those who are concerned about political reform.  These are separate communities and everybody's in their silo and this is not good.  Environmental communities also much more comfortable in its mainstream in developing wonkish proposals for policy action than it is in framing messages that really resonate with lots of people.  And as a result, we've lost a lot of support among the public and we're not talking to people.  And so when we see people coming along and talking about jobs for all, and green-collar jobs and things like that, it's very encouraging, because they're trying to break down that insularity, if you will, of the established environmental groups.  And then lastly, we've really got to build a grass roots movement.  I really-- other than some fairly devastating crisis that could change things and wake everybody up, and even that won't work unless it happens in a time of wise leadership, which we haven't had, the only-- beyond that, the real prospect for change is, it would be a social movement in the country, the gathering of forces beginning with young people, people concerned about the climate issue, religious organizations increasingly involved, concerned citizens of all types coming together and then reaching across these different communities and coming together and insisting that we take back our democracy, we reassert these human and natural values into the system before it's too late.

Recorded on: 3/23/08

Description: Increasing social inequality erodes democracy.

Transcript:  Well, when I started in this field in 1970 there was a-- we were so concerned about the problem and the immediate need to deal with the issues that were pressing at that time, that I remember we had this idea that we really-- education was too long-term.  If we were dealing with grade school children, you know, that was so long before they would get old enough to be running the country.  So we needed to act.  And for that reason and others, the countries never really invested seriously in environmental education.  Well, where are those children of 1970 now?  You know, like my daughter, almost 40, and she was running around in her diapers at Earth Day in 1970, on the bowl in Washington, and now she's 39.  And so we've never invested in a serious major way in environmental education.  And unfortunately, you look at so many of, you know, the surveys of the level of literacy on environmental and energy issues in the public, it's depressingly low.  So I think there's a huge education jump.  There's also sort of a necessity to reverse this terrible trend of people disconnecting from the natural world.  Even national park visitation is down, just over a significant period now, going down.  And, surveys have been done of people's exposure to nature and learning from nature and it's going down too.  So more and more people are in front of their machines of various types, and are not getting the enrichment and the learning, and the exposure to the natural world.  So when Richard Louv came along and wrote, Last Child in the Woods, it really caught on.  And in a lot of states now we have No Child Left Inside programs, and I think this is also very important.  Adult education is very important.  And I don't think we-- you know, it can be sophisticated, but it can also be sort of social marketing type education.  People, I hope, will learn a lot in this large public service advertising campaign that Vice President Gore is sponsoring now.  So there are a lot of different ways to learn, and we need to be spending a lot more time on that.  I'm very partial to, you know, environmental studies programs in universities.  That's my life now, and I really believe in it.  I would like to think that if all the students in our colleges and universities came out of those institutions with a real environmental literacy, we wouldn't be anywhere near the problems that we are today.  And if an earlier generation of people, even those who went to Yale had got a environmental education and, say, in the class of ‘68, then maybe we would have a more environmentally-enlightened administration today. 

Recorded on: 3/23/08

Description: We have already gone through a threshold we should not have passed.

Transcript:  There's a group called the Presidential Climate Action Plan, PCAP.  And our goal there is to develop ideas for a new president on the climate issue.  And in part, what we really believe has to happen is that the new president has to put the-- this issue as a first 100-day imitative.  There's a real risk because it's a difficult issue.  It's going to be a time consuming issue that if it gets postponed into that second or third tier of actions after healthcare and other things that it will take time, and then pretty soon we will be running up against another election cycle.  And somebody will come along and say, "Well, you know, this is just to hot a potato to," pardon the pun, "to take up at this time," and so we need to get it done quickly.  And the other reason for getting it done quickly, of course, is that we have an increasing amount of information coming from the scientific community that suggest that we really don't have anymore time.  When I was in the Carter Administration we did three reports on global warming.  And we called, at that time, for a major effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Now this was 30 years ago, and very little happened.  We had time, we didn't act, we blew it, now we have no time.  And you have some very notable climate scientist like NASA's Jim Hansen saying that we should be capping the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 350 parts per million, a number we'll probable hear a lot of about.  Well, we're already at 380 parts per million.  So, you know, we need—- if Jim Hansen is right, we've already gone through a threshold that we should not have passed.  And we need to find ways to take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as well as stopping the buildup, which would among other things, necessitate either no more coal plants or coal plants that insisted on this carbon capture and storage, the sequestration of the carbon coming out of the use of coal.

Recorded on: 3/23/08

Description: The entire capitalist system is outmoded.

Question: How much do subsidies distort market forces?

Transcript:  Well, they've been-- you have two ways that this economic expansion is subsidized by the environment.  One is just the, sort of, non-market consequences, mostly notably, say, greenhouse gas pollution.  All of us who use that pollution, but those who sell it to us, particularly, are responsible for a huge environmental impact that they are not paying for.  But they're also, that problem is compounded by the addition of subsidies by governments.  And there's one estimate that the environmentally perverse subsidies, internationally now, amount to, perhaps, at least $800 billion a year.  And this is in energy, it's in agriculture, it's in transportation.  And that further distorts the price mechanism.  And as a result, we have these environmental dishonest prices.  This basic system, then, is compounded by three other things.  First, it's an enormous-- it's the way the corporations are set up.  We've now charter corporations and established corporate law that says, in effect, the overwhelming duty of the corporation is to maximize the wealth of the shareholders.  This is the so-called shareholder primacy, best interest of the corporation principle.  It's totally outmoded, in my view.  I mean, we ought to be exploring rigorously a system where the corporation is governed by and beholding to all of those that contribute to the wealth that this corporation produces and that would include local communities, it would include workers.  So it's a fundamental change in the way that corporations are set up and the incentives that they operate under.  The second pillar of this is us, is our pathetic capitulation to consumerism.  And that, of course, is manipulated endlessly by advertisers and marketing and we succumb easily.  And off we go.  And that is certainly a huge pillar of the system.  The third is government itself, the state.  The state can raise extra revenues without raising tax rates by growing.  It can keep social issues on the back burner by pointing to the expansion of the economy as a solution to social problems.  Growth enhances the projection of power in a competitive international system.  So governments are deeply hooked on growth.  So this is the basic complex and it's enormously powerful and environmental community is simply unable to cope with a full burden of that system.

Question: What will the shock to the economy be if subsidies are not given out?

Transcript:  Well, it's pretty clear that if we had a world that had environmentally-honest prices and, indeed, socially-honest prices and militarily-honest prices, prices would be a lot higher.  A lot higher.  Both in general, so the reaction of people would be to shift their activities out of the market, which in many ways is a wonderful thing because it would mean we would be spending more time with our families, more time with our communities, more time with the natural world.  And it would also mean that activities that are environmentally destructive would cost a lot more, a lot more.  And the effect of this is to, you know, shift our consumer patterns towards things that are environmentally regenerative or benign.  But there are huge equity issues here.  And that's why, in the book, I really go approach in several ways, the length between dealing with our environmental issues and dealing with the social justice issues in our country.  We have a crisis in social inequality in America as well as an environmental crisis.  Soaring executive pay and earnings is the top one percent of the country, and a widening gap between the very rich and the rest of the country.  Poverty rates at an all time high.  Over ten percent of the public facing hunger, still, in our country if you can believe that.  One percent of the adult population in jail.  Failing schools, unprecedented proportion of the society without health insurance, and just tremendous social insecurity among most people in the country.  Half the families in the country make less than about $45,000 a year.  A family could be pretty big and the average of that, half is well below 45 of course.  So basically, you know, we have a society with tremendous wealth and tremendous capacity, but it's very concentrated and it's spent on-- it's not spent on promoting social well-being in our society.  And the environmental picture is no prettier.  So what we really have is a system that cares profoundly about profits and reinvesting a large share of them and growing.  It doesn't really care much at all about people, society, or the natural world in which it's embedded and that's why it's up to us as citizens to use the main tool that we have, which is government, to inject real values, other values, human values, long term values, caring values, compassionate values, natural values into the system.  And that's where we fail too often.  And failed in a big way because our politics are so enfeebled today and the corporate control of our politics is so strong that we're failing.  But the point is that we're all similarly situated.  Those who are trying to succeed in projecting values for about future generations and about the natural world into that system are failing just for the same reasons that those who are trying to project into that system or inject into that system values of about social justice and social well-being and social cohesion in our country.  And the same-- and so we all have a-- we're communities of shared fate and yet we're not talking to each other. 

Recorded on: 3/23/08

Description: Cap and trade legislation is in Congress: we will see what it looks like when it gets out.

Transcript: Well, I think we need to do two things.  We desperately need a cap and trade system.  I agree with that very much and, you know, glad that most of the proposals in the Congress now for action on climate are cap and trade proposals.  I think the design of that system matters, as much as the general concept does.  So I would hope that we would have a system that went very far upstream, so to speak, to right when the carbon entered the economy that it covers essentially all of the carbon and other greenhouse gases as they–- you know, their sources; that we auction the allowances of the right to emit carbon and take that money and use it for good purposes.  And if we do it the right way with-- you know, and have tough phase down goals, it can make a huge difference.  The risk is that Congress will come along and do its usual, you know, death by a thousand cuts to this proposal-- these proposals, and will end up with something which is not nearly as effective as it ought to be.  That's a very real risk, which is another reason why we need a real grassroots political movement in the country.  There's a group called One Sky, which is working with young people around the country and using well-established techniques of community organizing to engage people on the climate issue.  And I am very proud to have a small association with them and I'm–- I think that's what we need.  I'd also say though that this regulatory approach of cap and trade needs to be supplemented by a real expenditure of federal resources to be sure that the program's not regressive, that communities that need help get help, that new industries are created, that green collar jobs are created so that it becomes basically a program to sustain our communities and promote social justice in our country, at the same time that it's an environmental program.

Recorded on: 3/23/08