- And I'm very pleased that this evening
we have with us Dick Smith,
a former judge from our own Madison area here,
who is a very active leader
in the Citizens' Climate Lobby.
He is among other things
an enthusiastic cyclist.
He's also a hiker.
And I think I'll stop with that, Dick, right?
And I invite you, Dick,
to join us and share with us
what the Citizens' Climate Lobby activities
are all about.
- Bassam, thank you very much.
My name is Dick Smith,
I am with Citizens' Climate Lobby.
I'm a volunteer.
We have about 16,000 volunteers around the country now.
That's up from about 5,000 only a year ago,
and considerably less than that a couple years ago
when I first got involved.
I'm here tonight to give you a citizen's perspective
and I have to say,
I got involved four years ago in climate change.
I'll talk about that a little bit.
Then I want to talk about you a little bit,
find out a little bit about why you're here,
and what you've done, what you're interested in,
what you see.
And then finally,
get into a little bit more about what
the political opportunities are for ordinary citizens
to make a difference in changing public policy
on climate change.
So with that said, I have to add one more comment--
I should have put it up here.
Everybody had a quote.
E B White, who wrote Charlotte's Web said,
"Every day I wake up and I'm torn
"between a desire to save the world and savor it."
And when Bassam was talking about hiking and biking,
that's what I really wanted to do.
I got into this as an accidental activist.
There is no other way to describe it.
I had a very different retirement plan.
So I'm inviting you to join me in saving the world here.
I have one yard stick for measuring success tonight
and that's that at least some of you come up afterwards
and say, "Dick, I want to help."
And the opportunities to help have never been greater.
The world has changed dramatically in four years
for citizens who want to influence public policy.
After Cap and Trade there was almost nothing
happening at the grassroots level.
I credit Bill McKibben and James Hansen
with changing that.
Bill McKibben through 350.org
and a demonstration at the White House
that I think sparked the modern day movement.
1,250 people got arrested there.
Two years later there were 40,000 people in DC.
A year after that, 400,000 in New York.
So the movement has grown.
Barbara Boxer--
well I'll get to that later.
No I won't, she said, "We need a million people
in the streets of DC."
So that's a goal we can shoot for.
Let's hope it's a warm summer day.
All right, help on what?
I'm in a couple organizations,
and certainly not the only organization.
I guess a point I'd like to make at the outset,
four years ago there were no civic organizations
working at the grassroots level on climate change.
Today you can't find a civic organization
of any real size that doesn't have
a grassroots committee working on climate change.
Every church, most local parishes,
it isn't just the Pope.
The NAACP, the downtown Madison Rotary,
doing some amazing things.
It really doesn't matter what group you're in,
it probably has a climate committee.
So there are no excuses these days
for not getting involved.
There are a lot of things that we can do
and should do on climate change.
We need a stable climate.
In my opinion, my bottom line conclusion,
the one essential thing we have to do
is get a federal price on carbon
that reflects its real cost to society.
We can take all people's good intentions
and all the other ideas and put them together
and add them up and they aren't going to cut emissions
big enough or fast enough to keep a stable climate.
We really do need some federal action.
So I want to talk about that first
and give you a quick overview on that.
There are some smart ways and some dumb ways
to put a price on carbon.
Let me show you a smart way, what I think is a smart way.
The case for federal action on climate change
starts with acknowledging it's a market failure.
Couple of different ways it's been said.
Sir Nicholas Stern, ten years he was the chief economist
for the World Bank.
He did a thing called The Stern Report
in 2006, famous on climate change
and the take away from that is,
global warming is the biggest market failure in history.
And what he means is, the price of what carbon does
to society is not reflected in the cost.
There are external costs of burning fossil fuels,
being shifted onto all of us.
Healthcare costs, the military costs of getting oil
from the Middle East, just a couple of them,
but climate change is the big one.
Bill McKibben said it a little more colorfully,
"No other industry gets to dump its garbage for free."
Naomi Orestes and Eric Conway--
How many have seen Merchants of Doubt or read the book?
Anybody? Okay, one.
They said it well, we all know this,
in 2008 we found out markets fail,
sometimes spectacularly.
And when they do, governments need to intervene.
When it comes to climate change,
government has four options.
Basically R and D, number one.
It's a great idea. It's not sufficient.
It's not going to get you the emissions cuts in the CO2,
the carbon dioxide, that we need,
big enough and fast enough.
We can't innovate our way out of the problem.
Secondly, subsidies.
You can subsidize wind, solar,
other alternative energies that don't burn carbon.
The problem with that is we can't afford it
and there is zero political support for it in Washington.
I just got back from Washington.
I spent a week in Washington last week,
with 800 people from Citizens' Climate Lobby.
We were all out there meeting.
We held meetings with almost every office.
The final count is not in yet.
I know it's over 520 Congressional offices.
And I can tell you there's no support for subsidies.
The third approach is regulation,
that's the approach Obama's taken.
Through the EPA he's regulating fuel efficiency standards,
power plants, new and old.
He's said that he'll have methane standards
in place before he leaves office.
The fourth option for government
when you have a market failure, is tax it.
Anybody here know who Arthur Pigou is?
Yeah, I didn't either.
He's an early 20th century economist.
He's credited with saying if you want less of something,
tax it.
So there's a wing of economics called Pigovian economics.
In this case we want less of carbon, so tax it.
Here's the problem, how can we tax it?
If you put a tax on carbon,
the CBO has looked at carbon taxes.
The Congressional Budget Office has looked at them.
I'm going to give you a thumbnail of what they'd say.
Assume a $10 a ton tax on CO2 emissions.
Do it one time at the first point of sale
when the carbon comes out of the ground.
Okay, coal comes out of the ground or the oil
or it comes across the border.
Assume that that tax is passed on though,
through the economy 100%.
For every $10 a ton that you tax CO2,
you're going to increase fuel prices
about 10 cents a gallon at the pump,
that's the rule of thumb there,
and about 1.2 cents per kilowatt hour.
The federal government will also raise about $55 billion
in revenue for every $10 a ton.
CBO will also tell you it's a drag on the economy.
Carbon tax, it will be negative on jobs.
You'll slow job growth.
Same thing with GDP, you'll slow GDP growth,
and at $10 a ton you won't get the emissions cuts you need.
So what do you do?
CCL says make three simple changes
to that $10 a ton tax.
Put an aggressive tax increase on there
but start small and grow it over a generation.
So add $10 a ton to that tax
every year for the next 20 years.
So 10 years out you're $100 a ton,
20 years out you're $200 a ton.
Second change you have to make, make it 100% revenue neutral.
How many of you have heard of the Grover Norquist
No Net Tax Increase Pledge?
Yeah, usually I leave the word "Net" out.
Most people don't know it's a "No Net" tax increase.
Revenue neutrality means every dollar
of that 55 billion that is collected has to be returned.
Government can't grow a bit, that's the no net tax increase.
That's what revenue neutrality is.
And that is what you have to get a single Republican vote
in Congress for anything resembling
what we're talking about.
So all the revenue that we're proposing here
gets returned to American households.
55 billion the first year and whatever it is
when it goes up to $20 a ton it gets larger,
say 110 and then 165.
All that money comes in.
It all stays in the economy.
Anybody here on social security, another show of hands?
Okay, a couple are retired.
You know how you get that check once a month?
This is just like Social Security
with one real difference.
Social Security everybody gets a different amount.
With this proposal, everybody gets the same amount.
Bassam, myself, Bill Gates, you.
We all get a check for the same amount once a month.
It's our share of that $55 billion.
So as it's coming in, we get it right back in a check.
They've done this in other countries.
Third thing, this is really not controversial.
You need a border tax on imports.
This is the deal with what I'll now call
the India problem, used to call it the China problem.
What do you do with a country that doesn't have
a carbon tax and they import heavily into this country?
They have a competitive advantage over
American businesses and there's also an incentive
for American businesses to go there.
You get carbon leakage,
you know you put the tax on and the carbon leaks,
and goes over to India.
I use them as an example.
Any country that doesn't have a carbon tax
comparable to what we're talking about here
would have a fee put on their imports
based on the carbon content of the import.
It's perfectly legal under two different sections of WTO.
I'll leave it there.
This is a noncontroversial section.
It's now in the two most recent carbon tax bills
introduced in Congress, both have this provision.
We been pushing it for four years.
Both Republicans and Democrats are eventually
going to support something like this.
Okay, what happens if you make those three changes?
Aggressive tax increase, 100% revenue neutral,
and a border fee, an adjustment.
Just those changes.
Jobs go from negative to positive.
Ten years out you're going to have 2.1 million net jobs,
more than you would have had without the tax.
This tax is actually a job generator.
20 years out, 2.8 million.
2.8 million is a full 1% above
what you would have had without this tax increase.
So this is not a sacrifice we're making, we're helping.
The second thing, the economy will grow.
Why? Because all the money is returned to consumers.
Our economy is a consumer economy.
The money gets spent,
people will buy things with that,
and GDP will go up every year.
It will go up at least 70 billion a year,
by the 5th year and continue on.
Third thing you get, and the cumulative increase there
is about 1.375 over 20 years,
1.375 trillion.
The most important thing to me though
is what happens at the bottom line.
With this slow but steadily increasing carbon tax,
what you'll get is emissions by 10 years out
in 2025,
would be 31% below 1990 levels.
They'd be 20 years out, 50% below
and that puts us on a trajectory
to get what we really need,
which is an 80% cut in emissions by 2050.
It's got the scale and the timing
to solve the problem.
That's a thumbnail of what I'm working on.
I'll just leave this with you, this slide.
I love Mark Twain.
I can sit and read Mark Twain quotes all day.
I love it.
One of the things he said is,
"The difference between the right word,
"and almost the right word,
"is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
I'm telling you, when you read about carbon taxes,
that's not what I just showed you.
This is a carbon tax that's revenue neutral.
There's an incredible difference.
Okay, enough on what I'm working on.
Here's an early lesson I learned.
If you're really concerned about climate change,
you need a climate group
more than any climate group needs you.
They've got smart people.
There are a lot of people now starting to work on this.
But if you are really-- You've read the stuff
and you get scared-- Well, let me just show you.
How many have seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind ?
There must be a lot of, ah, that's it.
Just about everybody. Hope you can follow this.
I know you think that's Richard Dreyfuss.
That's really me.
This is before I knew about climate change.
This is me after I knew about climate change.
This all happened in a weekend, it was a rough weekend.
I became, maybe a wee bit obsessed.
My family, my friends, my neighbors,
I'd go around talking about climate change
and we gotta do something and the world's,
you know, help me.
And they were puzzled.
After a while in fact,
it kind of looked like this.
This is what it was like to be a climate activist in 2011.
So I tried a link to what was then called
the Tar Sands Action Committee
and this was something that had been set up
to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline.
And they were going to have a big rally in Washington DC.
Bill McKibben was promoting it and I started following that.
And I called the Madison link after that rally,
after the DC really.
And here's what I found.
Suddenly I didn't have to explain myself to anybody.
I mean you could go to a group and sit down
and have some coffee and people knew exactly
what you were talking about.
It is a really important thing if you're doing this.
As citizens I can tell you, this is hard work.
What I'm going to ask you to do, some of it is hard work.
Meeting with editorial boards,
writing a letter to Congress at least once a month,
all three of your Congressmen, your two Senators.
Sending letters to the editor constantly.
We want to own the editorial pages of every
major newspaper in this country, and then every minor one.
So there are a lot of things that ordinary citizens
can do back home.
Lots of meeting one on one, lots of going out and speaking,
talking to your church groups.
But it's lonely out there unless you have some support.
What I found is we'd read the same books,
we kind of shared the same vision and
they were all wonderful people.
All the women were beautiful, they looked like Snow White.
And all the men looked too much like me.
There's too much gray hair.
We need some youthful faces and we're getting them.
That is probably the biggest change I've noticed
in the last four years.
One thing I will say about climate people,
they are a very diverse group.
Like in this picture, you've got a lot of Docs.
We are littered with doctors,
especially in a place like Madison.
Everybody has a PhD.
Educators of every stripe.
You've got a lot of Bashfuls.
People who've never done anything like this in their life
and they learn from watching others do it
and saying I can dip my toe in the water.
You've got plenty of Happys.
That's the one surprising thing to me.
And no Grumpys.
So we have an awfully good time doing this.
I've been in a bunch of climate groups
and I think I can speak on that.
One last thing about me and then I'll turn it over to you.
Tell you how I got into this.
It was September 2010,
and Russ Feingold and Ron Johnson
were running for the Senate.
Russ was running for reelection
and Ron Johnson wanted to beat him,
and I was a judge.
My colleagues and I had--
You're alone most of the time as a judge.
You're in your office, you're writing,
you're reading, you're thinking.
But Friday mornings we would have coffee.
That was our collegial event.
We'd go over to the Glass Bank
and sit down have a cup of coffee for half an hour
and just chat about anything.
There was a paper sitting there.
I don't remember if it's the State Journal
or the Milwaukee Sentinel ,
but I think it was the State Journal .
There was a little side bar.
And the side bar, you know, two paragraphs, very short.
And it said, it was a quote from Ron Johnson,
or a little thing on Ron Johnson.
And it says Ron Johnson says,
"Global warming's not real, there's no warming.
"But if there is, it's not humans, it's the sun."
And I can't remember the exact words
but that's exactly the gist of it.
I read it. Everybody started laughing.
There were five people sitting around the table
and nobody said anything very nice.
And the guy laughing the hardest was sitting to my right.
And this was the mistake I made.
I literally said, "Okay smart guy.
"What if Ron Johnson came in, right now,
"sat down, right there?
"Tell me why he's wrong. Tell him why he's wrong.
"Why isn't it the sun?"
And all these smart people shut up.
I mean nobody had a clue.
So I went back to my, you know, set it aside,
we moved on to other things, went back to the office.
It was like a loose filling,
you know, you keep probing it?
And I wanted the answer to that question.
Why isn't it the sun?
So I told them hold my calls, I'm gonna get an answer to this,
and I got on the internet.
And for the rest of the afternoon,
and frankly what turned into all weekend,
I couldn't believe what I was reading.
I got my answer, I knew what I would say to Ron Johnson,
but I also learned a lot of other things.
And that's why I had that, the look in the after picture.
After a weekend of doing just about nothing
but reading about climate change.
At the time, there weren't too many options
for citizens to get involved.
We didn't have a 350 Madison chapter.
350 is probably the most prominent group now
for grassroots activities.
But we do now, and I was on the organizing committee
and for the first two years I stayed with it
on the steering committee and I was heavily involved
in the Keystone Pipeline fight
and some of the Enbridge fight that is going on.
I basically co-led the divestment fight here on campus.
I don't belong here. I don't live on campus.
I went to school here,
but try working as an outsider.
Trying to work with some faculty
and students and staff.
The interesting thing I learned was that at our peak,
we had ten people working on this.
That included two Madison citizens like me,
two of us, two professors,
one of them at the med school,
couple of academic staff and a couple of students.
We drafted a faculty senate resolution.
I was a judge. I wrote the resolution.
Bruce Barrett of the medical school introduced it.
And for six months the university debated on divestment.
Now we didn't win, eventually they tabled it,
but I learned a hell of a lesson.
That ten people who meet down at the union
every Friday afternoon and share a beer
and talk for an hour and a half
can turn this university inside out.
I was told that every single faculty committee--
How are you organized?
Department, I'm sorry, that's the right word.
Every faculty department had to have a position,
so they all had debates and discussions
and the whole faculty was working on this.
We lost the debate.
Eventually they tabled the resolution.
They didn't kill it but they did table it.
But out of it what came out was a commitment
and some staff positions in the Nelson Institute
to a climate literacy program here on campus.
And the idea was that no student
should be able to go through here
without being literate on climate change.
So it doesn't take much,
that's the take away on that one.
Citizens' Climate Lobby.
Let me tell you a little bit about that group.
It is a concept.
The world does not need
one more angry group, okay.
We only have one rule but it's a doozy.
You have to respect and appreciate
every member of Congress and his or her staff
for their public service.
If you can't do that we can't use you.
We are based on long term relationships
with these people.
That is the goal.
We are going to bond with them on values
and we are going to find common ground with anybody.
That's our goal. Alright.
As I said the specific goal
is to get some legislation passed.
We're all working on this revenue neutral
carbon tax that I outlined.
We don't have any dues.
We don't want your money.
We need time and talent.
And our activity, just to be clear on this.
I'll show you some Washington stuff
but 95% of what we do is organized
in local Congressional districts.
So we're working in districts all over the country.
That's our basic organizational structure.
About 5% of it is in DC.
I was telling Bassam I just got back from there.
We had over 800 CCLers in Washington
for the better part of a week.
We held meetings with almost every office.
This is a picture of the Early Risers group
on the first day.
I'm in some pretty good company.
And the take away for me was this, what a change.
Four years ago when I had my first meetings in Congress,
we were fighting about climate science.
I came back and said, "You know,
"I didn't have one person in one meeting
"mention climate science."
We're there talking about solutions.
We were talking about common ground,
things we could agree on.
There was an implicit assumption
both on the office and the volunteers
that were there doing the lobbying
that we didn't need to talk about this anymore.
We moved on.
That was probably my biggest take away from the thing.
I want to make this point, too.
Groups like CCL are not just a bunch of amateurs.
We do have our nation's best- known climate scientist,
is on CCL's board.
This is what he says, "Most impressive is the work
"of Citizens' Climate Lobby.
"If you want to join the fight to save the planet,
"to save creation for your grandchildren,
"there's no more effective step you could take
"than becoming an active member of this organization."
What's really nice about James Hansen,
he was there at the conference that we held
before the lobbying.
He spoke not just in the keynote
but also in a breakout session.
This guy has done it all.
Al Gore gives him credit
for training him on climate change.
Bill McKibben gives him credit for coming up
with the number 350, as in 350 parts per million
for climate change, and Citizens' Climate Lobby's
got him on their board.
It's a trifecta. He's quite a guy.
We're a very bipartisan group,
nonpartisan group.
George Shultz is on our board.
He's a strong supporter of a revenue neutral carbon tax.
His claim to fame though is that
no other American has held more Cabinet positions
than George Shultz, and I put them up there for you,
Cabinet-level positions.
And he's also in terms of dealing with Republicans,
George Shultz was chairman of the economics department
at the, not just any university,
but at the University of Chicago.
And for Republican economists,
that is the university.
He's an incredible asset,
he's just an amazing guy at 90 years old.
I'll skip the war stories.
We also have a former Republican member of Congress,
Bob Inglis.
He's proud to say and says almost everywhere,
"For 12 years I represented the reddest district
"in the reddest state in the country."
And yet he's out there
working just as hard as we are.
He was our keynote speaker 2 years ago.
These Republicans aren't unusual
because when you look at economists,
the chief economist to every president since
Jimmy Carter have endorsed the carbon tax.
How many remember Art Laffer, the Laffer curve?
Ronald Reagan? Yeah, some hands going up.
He's there lobbying on climate change.
Greg Mankiw is George Bush's chief economic adviser.
He says, "The carbon tax is the closest thing
"in economics to a free lunch."
There are also four republican EPA administrators
endorsing a carbon tax going back to Richard Nixon,
all four of them.
This is one of their New York Times op-eds
when they were supporting Barack Obama's EPA regulations.
They started their editorial with,
"A market based approach like a carbon tax,
"would be the best path to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions."
There is Republican support for this proposal
and we desperately need Republicans to get behind this
because you're not going to pass climate change legislation
that gets big enough and fast enough cuts
without bipartisan support.
So, why do they support it?
I gave you the Mankiw quote,
also Lindsey Graham, the economic side of it.
The Lindsey Graham in 2010,
"Every day we delay
"is a day that China gets a leg up in the green economy."
We also have people like Katherine Hayhoe.
Anybody see the Showtime Series,
Years of Living Dangerously ?
Okay, it was a good series on Showtime last year,
climate change.
She is a national treasure.
Time Magazine calls her
one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
She's on our board.
And last I'll close with Bill McKibben,
our nation's best known climate activist,
"I love working with Citizens' Climate Lobby.
"Their relentless focus on the need
"for a fee-and-dividend-solution is helping drive the debate
"in precisely the right direction."
Okay.
That's us. I do want to ask about you.
This is the most recent survey, the "Six Americas Survey."
Fellow named Anthony Lezirowitz
is a professor at Yale.
He has done more climate polling I think
than anyone in America.
He's been doing it for over a decade.
He is really sophisticated on this stuff.
I have heard him speak about it
and they put out many, many reports.
It's the Yale Project on Climate Change Communications
in association with George Mason University, as well.
His "Six Americas of Climate," he takes all of us
and puts us in six categories
and says we go from Alarmed, 13%,
Concerned, 31%,
Cautious, if you had to put one word to it, 23%,
Disengaged, 7%,
and then Doubtful and Dismissive, both 13%.
That's the most recent poll,
and that's reasonably consistent over time.
Yes, ma'am?
- (Audience) I have to ask you
what does the pollster mean with Cautious?
Does that mean that 23% of people are....
- I would call it undecided.
Let's just call it undecided.
There's a longer definition but,
she asked, "What does Cautious mean."
And Cautious would be undecided.
Where would you put yourselves, I just want to ask?
If I through the word climate change out there,
how many of you would say, "I'm Alarmed?"
Oh wow, that's terrific, and that's what I hope for.
And Concerned? I would expect most of the rest.
Some Cautious, couple of Cautious?
There we go, good. Somebody's gotta represent them.
Anybody's in disengaged, doesn't care at all?
You wouldn't be here.
And the same I suspect with Dismissive and Doubtful.
This is not the kind of audience I'd expect.
Where do you think Republican members of Congress are?
Anybody? Shout out. What?
- [Audience] Cautious. - Who said that?
You got it. They are Cautious.
Usually people will say Deniers.
They are not Deniers. They are Cautious.
The good news here is that most
Republican members of Congress
recognize climate change is a real concern
and something they need to do something about,
that government does need to respond.
They will tell you privately that the fringe
of the party has captured the center on this issue,
and they'd like to get it back.
Making that happen politically
is what is going to take people in this room
and their help to make happen.
If you add up the Alarmed and Concerned,
you get 44%, right?
And that's a pretty good number.
This to me is a very good news chart.
Let me put the same basic numbers in this context.
Last year, April 2014, Gallup did this poll,
they said, "What do American adults
"worry about the most?
"What are the issues?"
If you look down near the bottom there,
just above race relations, you'll see climate change.
And it's about the same.
About 24% worry about it a great deal,
about 25% a fair amount.
So that's 49%, close to the 44.
The problem is, look what else they worry about.
There are a lot of issues above it.
So there's some work to do here.
The difference between the people
in the "Six Americas" poll who are not Alarmed,
and the Alarmed group is they've moved climate change
to the top of the list, and there's a reason for that.
There are lots of issues out there, let's face it.
There are a lot of smart people in this room.
You could choose a lot of issues.
They're all good ones that you could work on.
There's nothing on that list,
homelessness, the economy, unemployment.
They're all worth working on.
So why climate change? What makes it unique?
Let me just cover the basics and then get to that question.
So we're all on the same page.
Everything you need to know about climate change
is in 10 words.
It's real. It's us. It's dangerous.
That's the basics right there.
Scientists agree on those first three things.
There is no scientific debate.
And that is a really important point.
One of the things Anthony Lazirowitz,
that Yale professor pollster, has found is that
this is the gateway belief to political action.
As long as people think there's a legitimate
scientific debate, they sit on the sidelines.
That's what I did. I didn't know.
I assumed someday I should get around to climate change.
That's one of the problems we ought to solve.
I figured it was a problem like any other problem.
So the gateway belief, I thought there was
a legitimate debate, maybe.
I hadn't looked at it, I really hadn't looked at it.
And until people do look at it,
until they understand the overwhelming
scientific consensus, they won't act.
So if you have to convince anybody of one thing,
this is the thing they have to understand,
that the scientific community,
especially the climate science community
is just virtually united on this.
Okay the last two words, "Solutions exist."
You tell people all the problems
and you don't tell them the solution?
There's a Berkley political scientist
who has done some research on this question,
he says if you-- and I'm going to stump on his name.
Rob Miller. No. Doesn't matter.
Berkley political scientist who says you give them
the solution, I'm sorry, you show them
all the scientific problems and how bad it is,
and you do all the gloom and doom and explain,
and there is some gloom and doom,
that we've got to do something about this.
And people think he must be missing something.
You give them the same information
about how bad things are and then you show them
we have solutions that are technically feasible,
economically affordable, and politically viable,
and they think what a smart guy, really knows his science.
Just because you talk about solutions.
So you gotta bring the solutions piece into it
when you're talking to people about climate change.
Alright.
A couple of things on the consensus.
Y'all have a smart phone, most of you.
How many? Can I see a show of hands?
Okay, I don't have one yet, but I'm close.
I have an iPod.
When you go home tonight, take out your smart phone, Google,
don't do it to me now,
but Google scientific consensus on global warming.
And then pick the first or second entry
which is going to be Wikipedia,
good ol' Wiki, and start reading.
Because they have one of the best collections
I've ever seen of the scientific statements
on this from all over the world.
It is really well done, it's well organized,
and if you want to read what scientific organizations think,
go there.
They'll show you 38 national academies of science
have agreed, it's real, it's us, it's dangerous.
If you look at individual organizations
like chemists, or physicists,
or agronomists, or botanists,
the scientific organizations.
I like AMS, the American Meteorological Association.
Has to do with how weathermen got up to date here.
There are hundreds of organizations that have said,
"It's real, It's us, It's dangerous."
None of them disagree.
Look at peer reviewed articles,
another way to show the consensus.
James Lawrence Powell was appointed by Ronald Reagan
and then later by George Herbert Walker Bush
to be on the, what was it called,
the Council on Environmental Quality,
and I think he chaired it at one point.
He decided to take a look at it and say,
"Well what does the peer reviewed literature show?"
He looked at 20 years from 1990 to 2010,
maybe it was, yeah it was 2010.
Those articles by a margin of 500 to 1
adopted the "It's real, It's us, It's dangerous" formulation
as opposed to, for every one "Denier."
(coughs) Pardon me.
When you look up the authors of those peer reviewed studies,
thousand to 1,
so this is 14,000, roughly, studies.
Last thing on this and then I'll stop.
My Latin teacher would be proud.
Francis Bacon's Novo Organum Scientiarum
started modern science, okay?
The modern scientific method for understanding the world.
Couple principles here.
Facts tell you what's real,
not superstition, not revealed truths.
The most important point though
is that science is a collective enterprise.
It is a consensus.
It's nothing more than a consensus of experts.
That's what you're talking about
when you're talking about modern science.
There's no such thing as absolute certainty
or absolute proof.
It's just peers in a particular profession
who agree and who have reached a consensus.
Scientific ideas also need supporting evidence.
Both the evidence and the ideas have to be peer reviewed.
And until they are, they're really just a claim.
That's the foundation of modern science today.
So peer reviewed science counts a lot more than anything else.
The basics: "It's real, It's us, It's dangerous,
"scientists agree and we have solutions."
What makes climate change unique?
Three things.
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn said it I think best for me,
said, "We're the first generation to see
"the effects of climate change,
"and the last generation who can do anything about it."
There are three problems, all timing problems
that I don't think any other social issue has.
If you can think of one, tell me.
I need to correct my speech.
I call it a ten-year problem, then a thousand-year problem
and then a hundred-year problem.
Let me cover them quickly.
Here's the ten-year problem:
Global CO2 emissions need to peak
by about 2022, the early 2020s,
and then they need to drop significantly by 80%
at least by 2050.
Or we're going to cross what's called
the "threshold for danger."
The threshold for dangerous warming
is at its highest two degrees Celsius.
If we warm the planet two degrees Celsius,
about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, from what it was in 1750
before the start of the Industrial Revolution,
before we started burning a lot of fossil fuels,
scientists around the world virtually agree
we are in real trouble.
That is the threshold for dangerous warming.
So climate change is a unique problem
because it really does come with a time limit.
Here's the one that almost nobody knows about.
There's a thousand-year problem here.
2009 study lead by NOAA-- she was then at NOAA,
climate scientist Susan Solomon-- she's now at MIT--
found that once we stop putting all carbon dioxide
up in the atmosphere, no more human emissions, okay?
Temperatures will not drop significantly
for at least a thousand years.
So think about that: whenever we finally
come to our senses about global warming,
and stop putting more greenhouse gasses up there,
we're going to live with this, actually future generations,
the next 40, 50 generations are going to live
with what we've done,
with the temperatures we've created.
How many problems out there have no reverse gear?
At least on any human time scale?
This is one.
That got me close to getting in the game.
This is the one that really tipped it for me.
When you put it all together,
I call it the game-over scenario.
James Hansen, climate scientist,
probably the nation's best climate scientist
at the time said, "If we burn all the tar sands,
"the Canadian tar sands goo,
"then it's game over for the climate."
That was really important phrasing.
So here's my analogy for the hundred-year problem.
What did he mean by game-over scenario?
For me, it means think of yourself driving a car,
heading toward a cliff,
you know it's either Groundhog Day,
you know, with Bill Murray
and he's heading towards that cliff,
or Thelma and Louise .
But your kids are in the back seat
(coughs)
and you're heading toward the cliff,
and instead of slowing down, you're speeding up.
Now it's foggy, so you don't really know
where the cliff edge is, right?
You don't know when you're going to go over,
but what you need to be doing, (coughs) pardon me,
is hitting the breaks on greenhouse gas emissions.
Because once you go over the cliff, what happens?
You hit the brakes all you want, right?
Doesn't matter.
Nothing you do is going to matter.
The laws of gravity are going to take over
and that car is going to go down.
Global warming's like that.
We are warming the planet,
so far by about a little less than a degree.
0.85 Celsius,
about one and a half degrees Fahrenheit,
about that range.
Doesn't sound like much, but if we went
five degrees Celsius in the other direction,
we'd be in the depth of an ice age.
Bassam had a chart up there earlier that showed you
the cycles of the ice ages.
Wisconsin, at least northern Wisconsin,
would be under two to three miles of ice,
if we cooled the planet by five degrees Celsius.
So two degrees Celsius is a lot of warming.
The real problem is this, we've started it.
We're going to set in motion the physics
and chemistry of the Earth that Bassam can explain
to you at a later date.
There are a lot of feedbacks.
The Earth has done this before. It has warmed and cooled.
It has been ten to 20 degrees Celsius hotter in the past.
And that's happened through natural factors,
it's happened because of orbital changes,
that heat the planet, release stored carbon dioxide,
for example in the frozen permafrost,
the deep ocean clathrates, forests burn.
So it's not just humans that are going to do this.
We're going to start it, warm it enough that
permafrost melts and things keep going.
(coughs)
The problem, the game-over scenario
literally means human action doesn't matter anymore.
We've reached a point that even if we went
to zero emissions, we stopped burning all fossil fuels,
the planet's going to keep warming.
Okay, I've beat that enough.
When do we go over the climate cliff?
Really important question.
We've already warmed almost one degree Celsius.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet,
last year we found out that there were
two studies came out on the same day
using two different methodologies
said the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is going to melt,
humans can't stop it,
even if we stop burning all fossil fuel today,
it is almost certainly going to melt,
and sea levels will rise about ten feet.
That's a start.
So that's one cliff we've already gone over.
At two degrees Celsius the game-over scenario
is possible but not likely.
At four to seven degrees Celsius, if we go up that much,
the game-over scenario in my opinion's almost a certainty.
I don't think there's any real doubt about that.
Here's the problem.
Here are the reports predicting 4 to 7C warming
by 2100 if we continue business as usual.
Some of them, 2012 the World Bank,
these are really far out radical organizations, right?
These some of the most conservative organizations
in the world.
The World Bank, PricewaterhouseCoopers,
the International Energy Agency,
the International Panel on Climate Change,
that's a group of climate scientists basically.
Interesting thing about climate scientists,
unlike engineers,
engineers when they're going to build a bridge,
they take the worst case scenario and what:
multiply by four or ten, they put a safety factor in there.
You know what climate scientists do?
They take the worst case scenario or the range.
They look at the best case and the worst case
and they divide by two.
They cut it in half.
So, they're a pretty conservative group.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science.
That is the largest general scientific organization
in the world.
They're all saying if we keep doing
what we're doing with fossil fuels,
this is where we end up by 2100.
So what do we do about it?
I've already talked to you about the revenue neutral carbon tax
as the way to get the emissions down,
that's my preferred choice, but there are a lot of others.
Here's what I recommend for everybody here.
It's a two-step process.
You get educated and then you get political.
This is one you just can't sit out.
We need everybody involved in this,
doing something.
You can all do something.
Educated on what?
Let me give you a framework.
Got to know a little bit about science, not too much.
We're not talking about it now for example in lobby meetings,
but you want a sense of the science.
You don't want to be fooled.
And that's the science of global warming.
Then you want to know some of the impacts of climate change,
and that is a litany of horribles,
not going to go through them here,
from sea level rise to concerns about social justice.
That's all the bad news side of the story by the way,
those first two points.
To me every new scientific study
I read that comes out,
it's worse than the one we had last week,
last month, last year.
They're getting worse and worse.
The predictions, they're getting more and more extreme.
The good news side of this is the technology
and the economics.
Ten years ago there were very few studies
on the technology and the economics needed to solve this.
Particularly the economies was just lousy.
Very little out there.
The closer we look, when we look at the feasibility,
and scale, and the timing,
and then we look at the affordability issues,
the economics of this.
What are the estimates on the cost and the benefits?
The closer we look, the better it gets.
Almost each new study on the economics
and on the technology
shows this is cheaper and easier to solve
than it was last week, last month, last year.
So that's the good news side of it.
Then you get into where we need the citizen help,
in the politics.
If the economists estimate the costs and the benefits,
it's the politicians who allocate them.
They decide who is going to pay the costs,
who is going to get the benefits, if you know,
whatever costs there are.
And they've got to do that,
they've got to allocate those costs and benefits
among individuals, among business sectors,
states, regions, nations,
and also generations.
How much should this generation pay
versus future generations?
We're all in this together.
Compounding this, you've got to get a little bit
of familiarity with the legislative side.
What are the policy options? I gave you some of them.
I gave you the four basic ones:
research and development and subsidies
and regulation and taxes,
but within that, there's a lot to deal with.
And then there's electoral politics
and multiply all that by the local, state,
national and international level.
And this is a problem for people who like complexity,
climate change has all the complexity
you could ask for.
In terms of the media,
they're the last leg in this six stool chair here.
They're the referees.
You have an invisible problem.
You can't smell it, see it, taste it.
It's something where we need somebody
to mediate who's right and who's wrong.
They're the referees, they gotta blow the whistle,
throw the flags, call the fouls.
They're doing a lousy job.
Although some of them are doing a good job.
Let me just say if the science and the impacts
are the bad news, and the technology
and the economics is the good news,
I can say mixed news on both politics and media,
but they are critical, okay?
They both have a role.
Two kinds of people here today,
the KISS people, Keep it Simple Stupid,
and the Puzzle People,
those who love complexity and they want to say
show me the detail, that's how you convince me.
How many KISS people?
Your wives know. Your husbands know.
And how many are puzzle people?
Okay, more of you, yeah.
Both have their virtues.
You want complexity, you're a puzzle person,
human Kyoto greenhouse gas emissions,
knock yourself out, six different greenhouse gasses,
where they come from, what sectors use them.
Some beautiful informative charts on radiative forcing
from the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change
and we're not going to talk about them tonight, can't.
We're going to skate a stone across
the six areas that I talked about.
I'm going to give you the KISS version
on the science, and Bassam really did,
he set it up in the beginning, it's CO2.
Sure, there are lots of other greenhouse gasses.
They're are all important.
We need to deal with all of them.
I can tell you the legislation I'm working on
does deal with all of them.
We deal with every greenhouse gas.
However, the game is CO2. Why?
And we're going to get to that in a second.
It's fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.
Is it more than that? Sure.
It's land use.
There are other non-fossil fuel sources
of CO2, lime and cement.
There are a lot of ways that human activity
gets CO2 in the atmosphere.
But I'll round it off and say 80% of it is CO2.
So that's the big problem
from burning coal oil and natural gas.
The takeaway point though, you don't need a number.
All you need is this one sentence.
Too much CO2 stays up there for too long.
If somebody says what's the climate problem?
That's it.
How long is too long?
Learn one more sentence.
"The climate impacts of today's CO2 emissions
will last longer than the radiation
from today's nuclear waste."
If we continue business as usual,
if you look at the left hand column there
it peaks out at about 1,600.
That is 1,600 parts per million.
Until 1915 it had been probably 15 million years,
at least 3 million and probably 15 million years
before the world had 300 parts per million in CO2.
Okay? 300. That was 1915.
Hundred years later? We're at 400.
If we continue business as usual, the worst case scenario,
we're going to be somewhere around
1,600 parts per million.
That's the IPC's worst estimate
of what we could do to ourselves.
If we get there, it will take 40,000 years
for the atmosphere to get rid of that
down to where we are today,
and another 400,000 years
to get down to 300 parts per million.
The problem with CO2 is its atmospheric lifetime.
It stays up there forever essentially.
That's what separates it from all these
other greenhouse gasses that have
much shorter lifetimes.
The KISS version of the impacts, A to Z,
from acidified oceans to zoological extinction.
Like I said, you can go home and look it up.
You know what a lot of them are.
I'll just say for most people,
around the world, both here and around the world,
food and water are probably going to be
the tip of the iceberg.
Too much or too little water,
not too much food, but too little food.
So those are going to be the major problems.
On the technology,
take away point on the technology is it's still doable.
We can still stay below two degrees Celsius warming.
We have all the technology we need.
Delay and pray is not a strategy.
It's a recipe for a disaster.
Praying for a miracle, we don't need one.
What we need to do is deploy, deploy, deploy.
Every last bit of low carbon technology we've got,
and we need the incentives in place
to make that happen,
because all of our good intentions as individuals
aren't going to add up to enough.
If we do that, there's two ways CO2 emissions
are going to go down.
How we're going to get that 80% cut:
two flavors, chocolate and vanilla.
The first, the low hanging fruit
is we're just going to use less energy
on the demand side.
The demand for some additional conservation
and a whole lot of efficiency.
And innovators and entrepreneurs
who come up with efficiency innovations
are going to make a lot of money.
Great capitalist solution to this.
The flipside to that is that we're going to
increase the supply of low carbon alternatives:
wind, water, solar, and nuclear.
And that's the solution.
Technically we can do this.
That isn't the showstopper.
Economically, it's affordable.
That carbon tax that I-- I'm sorry--
It's not really a tax, by the way.
The proposal I showed you with the outset,
is called a fee-and-dividend proposal.
The reason it's a fee and not a tax
is that government doesn't keep any of the money,
and as long as government really
doesn't keep the money it collects,
it's technically a fee and not a tax,
but I'll call it a carbon tax because that is the way it's,
the genre that it fits in.
But globally--
So we can put that revenue neutral carbon tax on
and come out ahead economically.
Globally, the international panel on climate change
released estimates last spring of what this would cost
in terms of GDP lost.
They said it would be .06% a year,
rest of the century.
Just take that out to 2050.
Take that smart phone out, put $100 in there.
Run a compound, get your calculator,
compound interest calculator, and compound it at 1% annually,
and you'll find that your $100 grew to $142 dollars.
Same calculator, put in $94.
Compound that.
You will find that you'll be 39% richer.
So if you take off-- I'm sorry.
If you take a same hundred dollars--
I misspoke my own example--
Take that same hundred dollars
and compound it at 0.94% each year,
you're going to come out at 39% richer.
You'll have $139.
But you will have a stable planet, a stable climate.
That's the difference.
I don't think there's anybody in this room
that cares whether he or she
is 42% richer in 2050
or 39% richer
if this means you've got a stable planet for your grandkids.
This is the order of magnitude, of sacrifice,
economic sacrifice we're talking about globally.
I want to ask you,
has anybody here joined a climate group?
This is an audience shout out.
Okay, none of you are members of a climate group.
Anybody participated in a climate event
or a climate campaign, like divestment?
Can I ask what sir?
- [Audience] I do the heating and air conditioning.
We started with the Kyoto Treaty back in the 70s, I believe.
And also we go the to Energy Fairs--
- Midwest energy fair?
Things like that? Sure.
- [Audience] Internet, browsing solar,
into development of solar panels all sort of--
(drowned out by background noise)
- So his business
is in the alternative energy business.
Is that fair way to say it?
And through that he's participating
in some climate work.
Anybody else? Yes, ma'am?
- I attended the Nelson Institute Earth Day celebration,
the Nelson Institute Earth Day celebration.
- Right, okay. It's a couple.
She said the Nelson Institute Earth Day celebration.
There is a need for all of you to get involved in this.
There's a lot of room to grow this thing.
You're here because you want to learn,
and I'm going to answer questions,
I don't want to talk all night, that's a bad way to go.
Let me give you four basic options.
One is get involved in any civic group
or look at the civic groups you're already
involved in-- and that's not on this list,
but I mentioned that.
Most groups now are getting a climate committee going.
This is not the world I was in four years ago.
There's basically four ways citizens can go with this,
if you want to do something.
Personal change.
Take personal responsibility for this problem.
I was talking with Bruce Johnson
with WHA here,
who was telling me some of the things he's done.
It's remarkable.
He's the technician whose helping us out today.
He's taken personal responsibility,
solar panels on his house,
an electric car, things like that.
That's pretty much what Al Gore's
climate reality project is about.
I'm simplifying but it's in that genre of telling people
you really need to take some responsibility.
My problem with that,
it is not big enough and fast enough.
We're not going to get the cuts we need
to cut CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050.
People's good intentions aren't going to work.
Legal action, I put legal action down there,
but if it was Bassam it might be through
the American Chemical Society.
He was past president.
As president of that society, he issued a statement
on climate change.
It was an editorial that he co-wrote,
that said something that I have almost never seen.
He's telling climate scientists to speak out,
chemists to speak out and get involved in politics,
that they can't sit this one out.
That's amazing.
Most scientists want nothing to do with this
in terms of the politics of it.
That's how we met as a matter of fact,
because of that editorial in
the Chemical Engineering News I think it was.
So you can work through your professional organizations.
I'm a judge.
So I looked at the law and I said you know what?
I'm not skilled enough at this stuff.
I can participate in the local,
state and federal regulatory hearings,
but really that's a game of experts.
There's some room for citizen participation,
but most of the legal arguments are going to be
done by people who really know what they're doing.
Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign is amazing.
Their work on trying to close and shutter
coal fired powered plants has followed that approach
and done some amazing things.
Keystone XL Pipeline Fight, the Enbridge Pipeline
that is coming through Dane County
as an alternative to Keystone
is a similar legal action where local 350 group
is heavily involved.
You can also go to court,
doesn't just have to be regulatory hearings.
Our Children's Trust is representing children
in states all over the country saying
this atmosphere of ours,
we're holding it in trust for future generations,
and here they are and they want you to fix it,
they want you to do something.
And courts, we want you to mandate that
the Environmental Protection Agency
in state after state has to do something
to keep us below two degrees Celsius warming.
And they've had some success.
The problem with that approach is that
it's most useful in states that don't have
any environmental protections.
Because once the legislature is enacted
some air pollution standards,
they take precedence over the common law.
So they've got some legal hurdles.
Natural Resources Defense Council, another example.
Let me get to the more common things,
the politics and the citizen involvement.
Demonstrate.
There are options from street theatre
for those of you who are still youthful at heart
and want to go marching down State Street
to civil disobedience
and there are a variety of things happening.
I was in Washington at a rally,
peaceful rally in the middle of February.
40,000 people were there. 350 sponsored it.
We had three busses go from Madison.
We left here at 6 at night.
We ended up getting the mandatory snow storm
in Pennsylvania.
Whenever you go through Pennsylvania in the winter on a bus
you gotta get a snow storm.
Anybody who's gone to Washington knows that.
We got there at about 11 o'clock.
The drivers got us in.
We had gone through Milwaukee. We'd picked up one bus there.
So here are the three busses, we pull up and it's 11 o'clock.
The rally starts at 12 and then five hours later
we got back on the bus and we came home,
turned around and came home.
You really get to know your bus mates,
let me tell you, that's a good time.
And let me credit Sierra Club,
350 and Sierra Club worked together on that,
as did just about every local environmental group,
but Sierra Club paid for the busses.
We were there-- Barbara Boxer said at the rally,
"This is great. We have 40,000 people here.
"What we really need if we're going to move congress
"is a million people."
And I thought, nah, not in February,
but maybe in the summer.
And a couple years later like most of you know,
we had about 400,000 people in New York.
So there's a lot that's happening that way.
You've also got if you really want to go extreme,
and I'm not promoting this,
Greenpeace , what's called monkey wrenching,
getting in the way of what businesses are trying to do.
And right now they're doing some stuff in the arctic
to prevent drilling up there,
one of the most fragile places on the planet.
My real focus, and this appeals to me, is policy change.
There's a couple of ways to do that.
Get involved in campaigns.
One of the things I did a couple of years ago
when I first got into this was,
somebody said we should get the candidates to debate.
Tammy Baldwin had an open seat.
She was going to run for the senate.
That meant somebody, almost certainly a Democrat
was going to get the seat.
And Kelda Roys, in the state legislature,
and Mark Pocan, also a state legislator, were squaring off.
And in early June I called both their campaign managers
and said, "You know I'm with this group
"called Citizens' Climate Lobby and I'm also with 350,
"and we'd like to cosponsor a climate debate
"and have the candidates debate climate change
"for one hour,
"and it won't be like any other debate you've ever done,
"because I'm going to give you the questions,
"and I'm going to give you the answers," and I did.
I wrote up the questions and gave them four pages
of answers to all the questions.
And I said, what we're going to ask from you
is come and you do the debate,
and we'd like written answers to all our questions.
You can answer them any way you want,
but we don't want the answers until the day after the debate,
because we want a chance to go through a Q and A
and educate you.
Long story short, they didn't do anything
for a couple of months and it was maybe, maybe, maybe,
we'll see.
Finally, one of them bit and the other one
was in within an hour, that's the way it worked.
So I moderated the debate,
asked them the questions, it's all history.
They asked me before the debate.
Oh, by the way, I promised them 25 people in the audience.
We delivered 50.
I'm sorry, I predicted 50.
We had 112 people there.
We had everybody we could get
on a beautiful summer night there, and they were impressed.
And they said what do people really wanna hear?
And the honest answer was, you know, Mark and Kelda,
we've heard from politicians who say
they're willing to listen and learn.
What we need now are some politicians
that want to lead.
I'll do this humorously, but the tape is out there still.
Wisconsin Eye came and broadcast it,
and has the tape somewhere because I've seen it.
And these two people got up and did a marvelous job.
They really did, and they said,
"I wanna lead on climate change."
And the two of them-- I think it's the only place
in the country where two candidates of a major party
competed for the climate vote.
I want to also credit Mark Pocan who actually won,
as you all know.
He delivered on every promise he made.
He was just terrific, and has become a real
climate champion in Congress.
Can't say enough good about him.
He joined the climate caucus there,
has become a real leader on it.
Okay, getting involved in policy change.
Also there are climate campaigns like divestment,
if you're interested in that here at the university.
I'm not involved in that anymore.
And the Paris talks, I won't go into that
because I think that takes a separate pitch.
Finally, let me say, there has been some progress.
This is political progress. I told you how I started, right?
Ron Johnson's comment, "There is no warming,
"but if there is, it's the sun."
On February-- I don't have the date--
But in February 2015, the US Senate
voted on a resolution to say-- or I'm sorry--
an amendment to say global warming is real,
and Ron Johnson supported it.
He didn't support the next amendment
which said that humans contribute to it.
But, we've made some progress.
That's all we're asking here.
We're not going to get everybody's vote for this,
but we're going to need a little help
from a lot of members of Congress.
So why are people reluctant to get involved?
And this doesn't mean you.
Why do you think people
don't get involved in something like climate change?
Just, this is an audience shout out,
and she has a microphone if anybody has an opinion.
In the back.
- [Audience] They tried it in the past and felt let down.
- They tried it in the past and they felt let down,
absolutely.
So, it's a waste of time, is that what--
Yes?
- [Audience] It seems to me there's an alliance
between certain funders of campaigns
and then people who are
more interested in social issues.
You know, the Koch Brothers funding
basically candidates who are anti-gay...
or pro-intelligent design
and there's sort of an unholy alliance there.
- I hope you could all hear that.
Basically I'm going to summarize it my way
and say fossil fuel money, right?
Money matters most.
That's probably the most common, unstated
reason that people don't support it.
Usually there are a lot of other reasons
they'll give you and you start cutting
through it and they say, look I don't think we can win.
You know, money. Money, money, money.
Any other reasons that really come to mind?
Sure.
- [Audience] I think one of the big things I saw
in your list in the beginning where climate change
was at the bottom of the list,
is that everything above it seemed to be
an immediate problem.
The economy needs to be fixed now
and all those other things were putting out fires,
so I think people are too busy worrying
about putting out fires to worry about something
as far away as the impacts of climate change.
- Absolutely.
I take one or two more if anybody,
down here, down here?
- [Audience] They think that if their--
- [Dick] Closer to the mic.
- They think that if their neighbors
or people that they know aren't doing it
they're going to seem like they're going against the flow.
They're worried about their status
in a neighborhood.
- Tribalism.
You want to be a member of the tribe.
You don't want to get kicked out of the tribe, absolutely.
- [Audience] A lot of the groups
that you might try to contact
to get involved into political action,
the response you get when you make an inquiry is,
just send money online,
and if you don't want to put your credit card information
out online, that's where it stops.
- I appreciate that comment,
and I want to reiterate,
the groups I work with have no dues.
Citizens' Climate Lobby has no dues,
no membership fees, no nothing.
It's time and talent.
We don't want your money, I just want to make that point.
But money is a problem, they think,
"I'm going to get asked for money.
"They want my money."
Yes, ma'am? Here it's coming.
- [Audience] We know we're guilty for it
and we're not really invested in giving up our cars
until it happens.
We're not changing our lifestyles enough.
And we know, it's us,
right here doing this to the rest of the world.
- There is a need to get
your own life straightened out.
I don't pitch people on personal responsibility though,
and the reason I've told you is
it's not going to add up fast enough.
I'm saying I don't care what your lifestyle is
or how many light bulbs you burn
or what kind of car you drive,
we need Federal government to act on this.
We need some help at the Federal level on climate change.
Anybody who looks at the problem agrees with that.
Then you get into nuanced arguments about how.
Let me cover just
two reasons that I get most, and then I'll stop.
Then I'm done.
People do tell me fossil fuel money.
When you cut through it, everybody thinks
in politics money matters most.
And Republicans.
They say Republicans will never vote for this.
So let me just say a word about that quickly.
In the United States, if money matters most,
I think the technical word for it is we're screwed.
Because three of the four richest companies
in this country are fossil fuel companies.
And it gets worst if you look around the world.
It's eight of the top nine are fossil fuel companies,
so there's no question these companies are rich
and they're connected in a way around the world,
with every government around the world.
It's an important industry.
I can tell you though, in politics,
I have worked for two governors.
I was on the staff. I was a law clerk for one.
I ran the legislative program
and the State Assembly for another.
I also had the privilege of working
for two speakers of the Assembly here in Wisconsin.
This is before I was a judge.
It was the early part of my career.
The last 20 years I was a judge.
I can tell you with absolute deep-felt conviction
that in politics the antidote to money is people.
Okay, that is the antidote to money on any issue.
And it is-- Thank you for putting that
up there from my group Citizens' Climate Lobby.
It is our job as citizens to create
the political will, to act on climate change.
That is your job as a citizen, and I'll tell you this,
if people like you who are educated, you're smart,
you care too, you're taking an evening off
to come learn about this.
If you leave the heavy lifting to people like me,
it's not going to get done.
We need everybody involved in this.
You got kids, you got grandkids, think about some of the reasons
you really should get involved.
Okay, some good news, on Republicans.
I gave you my anecdotal,
but in 2012 the League of Women Voters--
I'm sorry Conservation Voters--
did a survey of Republicans under age 35.
If this doesn't give you hope, nothing will.
They were given a list of words to describe climate deniers.
These are Republicans under 35.
53% picked ignorant, out of touch,
or crazy to describe climate deniers.
Now, people in Congress know this.
They are well aware of this.
And they understand that there's not much future
for a political party where 53% of its youth think that,
at least on this issue, on climate denying,
there's no real future in sticking with that.
The question comes down to have climate deniers
really captured a major political party?
I don't believe it at all.
I put it as not really,
gave you the one most Republicans under 35.
But you can look at poll after poll of Republican voters,
and by roughly a two-to-one margin,
varies with the poll and varies with the question.
Republican voters say we need to act on climate change.
That's also what you're going to hear from
most Republican members of Congress.
We do need to do something.
They don't agree on some solutions yet.
This is not limited to Republicans actually.
I think every member of Congress,
any political person is just by nature cautious, okay?
But in climate change,
Republicans are particularly cautious.
I would say most are concerned,
and I've told you that what we do here
is the fringe of the party has captured the center
and they'd like to get it back.
Let me be clear about one thing again,
we need their leadership.
I spend 90% of my time working with Republican groups,
organizations, legislators,
members of congress, staff,
because we need their leadership.
They have been there before, they will be there again,
on this issue.
They have led before.
And I'm convinced that when they do
it's going to be with a revenue neutral carbon tax.
We'll see about that.
So, I hope some of you want to help me.
Be glad to answer any questions you have
and cover anything else you'd like.
Thank you for your time.
(Applause)