(00:00:00) In 1970 20 million Americans gathered across the country to show their support for a clean environment. That was the first Earth Day 20 years later approximately 200 million people celebrated Earth Day around the world and even more people are expected to celebrate Earth days 30th anniversary tomorrow. Tomorrow's Earth Day will focus on clean energy policies and practices and what people can do to promote the use of clean energy. Dennis Hayes was the national coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970 and is now the chairman of Earth Day Network. That's the group that's coordinating. This year's events. He's author of the book the official Earth Day guide to Planet repair and he's the president and CEO of the bullet foundation and environmental Foundation based in Seattle and chairman of the board of the energy Foundation. Dennis Hayes spoke at Hamlin University in Saint Paul, the speech was sponsored by the Minnesota project. Here's Dennis Hayes (00:01:07) had a chance to walk around Hamlin College a little bit. And and it's marvelous. I was in theory walking around thinking about what I was going to say and I actually found myself thinking back 30 years ago when I was a young person hormone still coming up through the body in the spring. I did my undergraduate work at Stanford. I was a senior in 1969 and In the spring is all these phenomenon broke out in that period of time we all turn to our favorite Springtime activity, which was seizing and occupying buildings. This is actually important in terms of the context of Earth Day because we often forget that Earth Day 1970 emerged from the 1960s and the 1960s were a decade. Sort of without parallel. It was a very different era than the one that we've experienced of late and one that the humor aside had within it an enormous Pathos and poignancy as well. This was the time when When Brave Young Christian ministers and an army of the young began to integrate the South and had Bull Connor train fire hoses and police dogs on them. And when small schools were being blown to bits and Freedom Riders were kidnapped and massacred. It was a time when an anti-war movement was touring America apart at the seams and causing a great many people to wonder how this nation which they all loved so much had embarked upon a course where we appeared to be on what many of us thought was the wrong side of a war. it was it was a very very difficult time in America and out of that sort of context in a strange sort of way came Earth Day, which was trying to do a whole lot of things but one of them was to provide a healing basis to pull America back together from all these rents and divisions and find some levels of common ground some things that everyone could agree upon would make this a better stronger healthier more vibrant country and try to accomplish that Throughout the 1960s the American economy was one of extraordinary growth and and at the root of Earth day was a recognition that we were having prosperity and everything was getting worse. The air was getting wretched. I mean we didn't tell that I grew up in Camas Washington a paper mill Community. We had 14 paper Machines. We had this gigantic pulp Mill and we had no Pollution Control technology of any kind there were essentially no fish Downstream in the Columbia River from Camus when my basketball team would show up someplace to play a game. We were ridiculed by the people as those little people who came from stinky Camus. in some bizarre way inside the town We took a perverse pride in that this was not stink. This was this was the smell of prosperity. This was something that went along with having a vibrant economy and jobs every video I grew up every single morning with a sore throat for the first 17 years of my life. And that was just the way that life was. big challenges sometime around 1970 not unrelated to the Earth Day phenomenon America almost in unison came to a dramatically different conclusion. That was not the smell of prosperity that was pollution. That was poison. There's absolutely no reason that I have to wake up with a sore throat every morning. There was no reason that my dad. Had to in a course of three operations have 90% of his stomach removed from various kinds of industrial damage that he and virtually everyone else in that Mill had to be deaf in the early 50s that wasn't necessary to making paper. You can do it without those costs. You can generate electricity with that acid rain consuming big parts of the country. You can actually have a mobile Society without having the air over Los Angeles look like an inverted bowl of split pea soup. So we set up to remedy that birthday was to try to internalize all of those other things and make them part of the process. So that prosperity and progress went hand-in-hand with the stronger healthier more vibrant more attractive. More Equitable more peaceful Society. It was a stunning success 20 million people turned out it was dwarfed anything that had taken place before the mayor of New York a republican with presidential aspirations decided to take advantage of this and we cooperated with them fully. He was a great guy named John Lindsay and he shut down Sixth Avenue for us gave us Central Park turned over police to produce crowd control. We put in a 1 million person demonstration in downtown Manhattan right smack in the middle of where NBC ABC and CBS were and the New York Times which set much the journalism tone for the country and that became an anchor event. We had business people one of the members of our board was a tycoon who drove around in a gold-plated Rolls-Royce another member of our board was George Wiley National welfare rights organizer an African American with a PhD in chemistry who devoted his life, which was altogether too short to help poor people we had Every part of America represented in this effort to pull together a new movement that the tried to achieve. how to say this try to achieve the realization of a brand-new understanding that had come to people and it was this that that we all have our right to a healthy environment. It doesn't sound terribly radical. Now. I mean a student I can see thoughts of yawns Crossing minds. Of course, you have a right to a healthy environment. That was not a perception in 1969 to date today. This is a right that is probably more firmly held by most Americans than many of the rights that are enshrined in the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. Nobody else has the right to put anything into our air or water or our ground or our food that is going to harm us and if they try to do it we will stop them and that's something out there with a 90 or 95 percent approval rating from Americans and it is the third rail of politics. We elected a new Congress in 1994 that decided to roll back 24 years of environmental progress, and it's slammed into a brick wall America Has Changed Our greatest successes have been in these fields where there are the concrete threats to individuals to their families to neighborhoods. If someone wants to put a toxic waste incinerator into your neighborhood, you've got a whole lot of tools at your availability to stop that from happening. Someone wants to drive a freeway through your neighborhood. You can stop them in their tracks to of there's something that's going to adversely affect you. You've got to write you've got an ability today to make it instead something that serves your interests on the community's interests. Where we've been less effective and this is now getting into what Earth Day 2000 is all about in this is a bridging strategy in modern environmentalism is in these big issues that are somewhat more abstract in some ways somewhat more important because their impact is so much more widespread the big Global issues. things like the human population growth probably the best study that's been done yet on carrying capacity for human beings those of you who studied biology understand carrying capacity is is the Optimal number of organisms that an ecosystem can maintained indefinitely into the future when you're talking about most animals. That's mostly talking about food supply the couple other variables put into it. It's a function of energetics when you're talking about human beings it's different because we can adopt so many different ways of living food supply is almost never the limiting factor. It's how much affluence do we have? How much energy do we use to we drive sports utility vehicles or do we drive a Honda insights or do we use public transportation? Do we make clothes out of synthetics or out of Organics? What kind of diets do we have? How many kids do we have? How big a house do we have? This study by David Pimentel at Cornell took a look at European standards of living tried to figure out how much of that currently the world can supply and decided that the permanent carrying capacity for the Earth for say someone living as a typical Swiss family lives. Today is about 2 billion people. We now have six billion and growing and we don't have any conceivable strategy to move from six billion to two billion before we move to 7 billion or 8 billion. Those people are now observing using harnessing for various kinds of human purposes. Most of the biologic not notes about 40% of the biological productivity of the planet biological productivity is the amount of sunlight that is captured by plants through photosynthesis and captured then and put into hydrogen carbon bonds that can later be liberated either mechanically or chemically or biologically through oxidative phosphorylation to release energy the constitute the basis of all life on the planet assuming that some synapses are clicking in my brain as my mouth is moving up and down both the muscular action in my brain and the nervous action of my mouth are both a function of oxidative phosphorylation. Its Sunshine that was captured through photosynthesis and is now being In released everything that any animal does is part of this basic thing human beings are now harnessing 40% of that for the planet to human purposes. And in the process were squeezing out millions of other organisms. The current rate of Extinction is conservatively estimated at losing 10,000 species a year our recent ravaged thorough study of how long it takes a unique species to evolve suggest that it's about a about a 10 million year process. So we are creating a huge biological debt and our current actions. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets a lot better. And that's the kind of issue that it is very very difficult to inspire people to get excited about because it's not an imminent threat to your health. That's not something that's going into your neighborhood. We can do things about particular species of the bald eagle is endangered of to Puget Sound Chinook is endangered if the snow leopard is endangered if the panda is endangered we can but most of these things are not huge but environmentalists turd. Megafauna charismatic. Megafauna big sexy things that you can focus attention on they're mostly the little nuts and bolts of biology. They things that make an ecosystem function. We had better study up in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest where they were spraying for caterpillars that were attached to a certain kind of moth was having a bad effect on the forest and an ecological study was completed the discovered that a different kind of caterpillar that was being killed by this pesticide was the only large creature that was capable of eating the duff the pine needles from Douglas fir. 100% of the pine needles are passing through the guts of these caterpillars that we were killing inadvertently. We just didn't know what we were doing. It's a little bit like a watch repairman as we lose these species. We are a watch repairman throwing away a little odds and ends the nuts the bolts little screws that Wheels without saving enough to make sure that this watch is going to function without really understanding how the watch functions and yet it's it's being torn apart. Of the big Global issues facing us some of them we don't have a clue how to address. I don't know what to do about racism. I don't have any idea what we do about religious strife and ethnic Strife what we do to eliminate war with the Incredible cost that it's had for thousands and thousands and thousands of years in ways that seem to be almost biologically hardwired into us as Critters of those big Global issues. We need to get some victories and the one that we know the most about how to solve is energy and climate change. We can scope out in elaborate detail how to move from where we are today in the global Energy System to one that is completely compatible with a sustainable future that's based entirely upon energy income from the Sun tapped directly and indirectly indirectly through wind and biological fuels and what have you We know how to become so much more efficient than we are that sometimes when you start talking about the real numbers people walk away in disbelief because it is stunning. I mean at that sort of the Cross level Europe uses half as much energy per unit of gross domestic product as we do some European elements use less than half as much as Europe as a whole America could almost certainly without even cosmetic changes in lifestyle and productivity creativity Comfort get by on perhaps one-fifth the amount of commercial energy that we're currently using with. Yeah. I moved into a house had a furnace that was 45 percent efficient. I replaced it with the furnace. That's 96 percent efficient. It had no insulation installed some insulation and had only single-pane windows that were leaky around the edges. We put in new casement windows with triple pains in them thing after thing after thing. So suddenly my bill for heating the house is 1/5 of what it was for the personal was there ahead of me. We have lighting uses 25% as much energy as other Lighting in their indistinguishable. You can't tell the difference in the amount of light or the quality of light. We have industrial (00:15:27) processes that are fast increases in efficiency. (00:15:29) I don't let me let me give you a sort of my favorite example that shows priced responsiveness because this one is crazy. It's way out Beyond the Edge, but it gives you some sense of magnitudes in terms of what happens with price. Every American probably on average owns an electric clock. So if you do a calculation assuming there are 260 million electric clocks and you figure out how much electricity is used by Electric clocks. And you do the multiplication which I've done it turns out that we now spend about 1,100 megawatts of electrical generating capacity running the clocks of the United States to power that if it's done in a coal-fired facility will be about 100 large railroad cars full of coal being delivered every day and spewing out sulfur oxides and acid rain and carbon dioxide ripping the Dickens out of someplace to regret that coal out of the ground and carted off perhaps across Minnesota as things are now stacking and into whatever power plant is going to be consuming it. That's for the little clock that is sitting on your stove or the little clock that is sitting next to your bed or the little clock that is some place in your life. Virtually every American also owns a watch that is also electric power T. But your watch is not powered by electricity from the grid your watches powered by electricity from an incredibly small mind-numbing Lee small little itty bitty battery. With almost no energy in it at all and yet somehow that watch on that little tiny bit of energy keeps going for a very long time the price of energy from a watch battery is about $24,000 per kilowatt hour gives you some sense of how much electricity you're getting when you buy say $12 or $15 battery. So watches seeing a price tag of energy of $24,000 per kilowatt hour for what somebody in Minnesota probably pays six cents per kilowatt hour from from your local utility. They have an incentive to be pretty efficient. And in fact, if every clock in America were as efficient as every watch in America the total amount of energy that would be using instead of having 100 boxcar loads of coal per day running up to it. The clocks would run for five years on one car load of coal. That's the difference that are really dramatic price signal likes. And it begins to give you some sense of the kinds of differences the kinds of changes that can be made in all of these things. We need to figure out ways for China to be super efficient for Switzerland to be super efficient and most importantly for the big enchilada for the country that was four percent of the world's population produces 26 percent of the world's greenhouse gases the country with four percent of the world's population that last year consumed 43% of the world's gasoline to get more efficient during the Arab Oil Embargo and then during the iran-iraq war Europe and Japan decided that they had a vulnerability that they didn't want to have their fuel supplies cut off by someone making arbitrary decisions on the other side of the planet. So they decided to charge a whole lot more for their fuels they put taxes on it, but tariffs on it collected a whole lot of income from people who would pay $4 $5 a gallon for gasoline and used it to build world-class. As public transportation systems used it to be engaged in smart growth used it in ways to substitute those taxes on something. They were trying to avoid to lower taxes under the things that they were trying to encourage such as savings labor something that minnesotans for an energy-efficient economy or trying to figure out how best to restructure here in order that you're taxing the stuff you're trying to discourage and lowering the taxes on the things you're trying to encourage and as a consequence, they both have vastly less dependence upon foreign oil today than the United States does. So OPEC jacks up the price of oil. We have a whole bunch of other things that filter into the prices of gasoline. We reach a market clearing price. It turns out of say a buck 85 a gallon. What is the response of the United States? Well, the first thing is can we take off that last for sense of federal taxes and having zero knowledge of Economics they say so that the price instead of being a dollar 85 will be a dollar eighty one, but in fact it won't Because after you put all that stuff in what you've got is a supply curve and the demand curve that are crossing at about a buck 85 and if you take off that tax that's for census going to go to oil companies and going to go to oil-producing countries. It's not savings. It doesn't do anything unless it's either decreasing the demand or increasing the supply and our policy. Don't do either one of them the way that you do that is by dramatic changes in price signals. Certainly, if you put a $2 gas tax or a 50 Cent gas tax that changes the signal pretty dramatically this Fortune for sense stuff completely washes out in the noise. (00:20:42) I don't know what to do about (00:20:44) this in the United States, but in area after area after area, we are seeing the wrong price signals and if you've got the price wrong virtually everything else that you do produce a second-order effects. We need to figure out ways to get through that. We need to form coalition's with people whose interests are congruent and we need to get America to recognize that. Well for starts loyal production in the United States peaked out in 1969. We have produced less oil every year since 1969. We have become more dependent upon other countries every year since 1969 and we ship more money overseas as part of our balance of payments as a consequence that and so what is our response has of society. Well last year 51 percent of our vehicles were sports utility vehicles Vans and light trucks. I if if you think a little bit about what these respective patterns mean my daughter, Will sum it up with an expression that her generation invented, which is the uh, I mean, of course we're getting more vulnerable. Of course OPEC is going to crank up the price just like any profit maximizer would do it and there's not much that we can do in response until we begin to make ourselves vastly more efficient. We finally know at least I have some options Toyota's bring in a Prius over that gets 50 to 60 miles per gallon Honda has a little too passenger insight to get 70 miles per gallon that's certainly a lot smarter granted the current role than a nine mile per gallon new Ford Excursion. I was having a cup of coffee with Bill Ford who's the chairman of the board of Ford Motor Company and after docking for a little while it turned into a bit of banter and I felt that I had by that time had enough of a rapport that I could ask him. So when do you plan to introduce the Excursion in Germany? And he looks at me for a few seconds just to sort of see is this guy serious and then we both chuckle right? Because he's never going to introduce the Excursion in Germany because in Germany, if you pull up in your new Ford Excursion to a service station, you really want to say fill her up. The bill is 200 dollars. There's no market for an Excursion in Germany. What what we are trying to do with this Earth Day around the world is capitalized upon those sorts of things in ways that hopefully will resonate global warming is a global issue. It's something that now is no longer a global controversy. This is this is largely a settled issue we have now had the National Academy of Sciences way in saying yes, it's real as well as the British royal Society the World Meteorological organization the International Panel on climate change, which is a wmo United Nations environmental program combined 2,000 scientists, multiple-year interdisciplinary study the national Center for atmospheric research. I mean essentially the entire geophysical the American geophysical society, which has never taken a political stance to my knowledge ever before in history has now as a society said that the evidence is so compelling on climate change that it is time to act. Scientist after scientist after scientist produces these three to five year studies publishes them get some written up in the newspapers. The first two paragraphs are the statement that one more study has shown that the evidence is overwhelming that we are endangering the future of the planet and then the third paragraph is always a quotation of one of eight bought and paid for quote unquote scientists who work for the coal industry or the oil industry or part of the electric utility industry and who have a strong PR operation behind him saying, well the evidence isn't all in yet. Well with climate change has with much of science the evidence is never all in but when when we have the evidence all in and climate change is after the climate has changed the the hard part about this is that it's not possible then to change it back these things took place over geological periods. This is a little bit simplistic. I don't mean to say there are no things we could do we can do everything from dropping iron filings in the South Pacific and weighs a little cause microorganisms to grow more calcium carbonate and precipitated out. We can plant trees we can do various odds and ends that Tinker with it a little bit. But the fundamental thing that's going on is that over hundreds of millions of years plants captured sunlight and put it into hydrogen carbon bonds that slowly over those millions of years under incredible pressure and temperature got converted into coal and oil and now we are taking millions of years of this geological process as bio geological process and reverting about burning that stuff and sticking the carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. You can pull it back down temporarily you can do all kinds of odds and ends but to permanently create a new carbon sink in meaningful ways for this enormous growth of greenhouse gases is something that again will take place in nature only over geological periods. This is an experiment that we must not run. This is a condition today of scientific sufficient certainty that we know enough to say this is not a direction we can go you everybody in this room in the last 30 seconds is taken a breath In that Breath You inhaled 30% more carbon dioxide than was there a hundred years ago as 30% more carbon dioxide than has ever been in the atmosphere of the world since the evolution of homo sapiens. There's almost nothing that we can do to stop it from getting to be 70 or 80% There are things we can do to stop it from being a hundred percent and we want to stop it before then and certainly before 200% or 400% someplace. There is a line that everyone will agree. You can't go past. I think the line should probably be as close to 50% as we possibly can. It would be wonderful if it had not gotten as high as it is because we're already having glaciers twice the size of Delaware cave off of Antarctica. We've already lost something over 50% of the glacier Mass up in temperate spheres. We're already seeing far more frequent hurricanes and far more violent hurricanes Versailles a windstorm ran through it last year. That was the most vigorous winds that have ever been experienced an uprooted a forest that had been planted by Louis the 14th, we have floods through Bangladesh and floods throughout the Pacific Northwest draughts in the American Midwest and this is not unrelated to the fact that these greenhouse gases are capturing more sunlight and acting as a huge thermal storage battery keeping that energy in our atmosphere and that much more highly energetic stuff is going to be doing something energy is work. It's going to be creating something and that something is almost never going to be something desirable. So, how do we get there? Technology essentially exists. We've we know how to build a solar-powered economy. We know how to drive down the cost of photovoltaic cells to the point where they'll be the cheapest source of electricity for more than half of all new electrical generating capacity in the planet. There was a time when small chips that don't contain anything like a microprocessor. These were quote unquote ships that maybe had two transistors and capacitor on them selling for a hundred bucks. I mean, it was crazy. You can buy this stuff for fifty cents. If you got them in regular size as opposed to these micro miniaturized sizes and there was no market for it. Nobody would buy something like that for $100 except the Department of Defense and NASA which was prepared to pay a serious premium in order to have something that's lightweight. So one year. It's a hundred bucks for this trip. The next year has volume goes up and you get economies of mass production. It's 80 bucks and it's 60 bucks is 40 finally. It's about two dollars and fifty cents somewhere along the line that transition moves out of mostly Federal procurement into mostly private procurement and Wires momentum this thing start growing. Suddenly. We have National Semiconductor in Intel and Micron and an information revolution that would not have happened. But for the federal government buying enormously expensive things and moving into economies of mass production and driving it down a learning curve. We wouldn't have that jet airplane if jet airplanes had not been bought when they were enormously expensive by the Department of Defense the Boeing 707 the great usher in of commercial jet aircraft began as a defense bomber in area after area after area that is how something has gotten started the internet for heaven's sakes began as arpanet. We should be doing this with regard to solar energy. It's not going to be Dirt Cheap. It would probably be between five and six billion dollars to get yourselves down to the point where it really is the cheapest source of electricity for that fraction of new generating, but that's pocket change. That's that's on the order of under 10% of the amount of money that we will Funding abroad for oil this year and the consequences would be a radical transformation of the human Prospect. And in area after area Minnesota is out. There is one of the leadership groups because you had some very clever public policy in the state and wind power. There are interesting things being done with all manner of biological fuels from ethanol were again, you're doing some interesting work to biodiesels to efforts to use microorganisms to grow oils in Solutions commercially to and two things out on the frontier. I'm quite convinced though on this. I can't say it with a certainty that I will about solar cells that we can get there with photo electrochemistry to a photo electrochemical cell that very very very cheaply will be splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen even more cheaply than generating electricity to split it in at that point. Again, the Revolutionary transformation of the human Prospect because we have an energy system that consists of water plus sunlight splitting the water into these things that then Recombined in a fuel cell producing zero pollution giving you with very high efficiencies electricity again, whenever you need it with the only by-product being water that you can then split with sunlight. It's the perfect self-contained Energy System. It's going to be there. But only if we make a commitment to it. Let me talk about why America is so vitally important here. I mean I said that it's a global problem. We're all in it together. We're all going to suffer the consequences. We all need to pay the price. But America is the big enchilada. Not just because we produce vastly more greenhouse gases per (00:31:17) capita. But he also in the (00:31:19) planet vastly more not just per capita, but in total than anybody else in the planet, but because We are the source of scientific Excellence. If you are a graduate student in physics or chemistry or biology anywhere in the world and you want to get a PhD you are aspiring to get into an American graduate program because they're superb we have the best National Laboratory system in the world. We have most money in this is stuff that somebody needs to make investments. The American Stock Market is worth more than all the other stock markets in the world combined. I mean he'll half of our.com companies are worth more than some of the other stock markets and I was quite blown away. I think it was two weeks after Yahoo! Went public to learn that Yahoo! Was then worth more than the entire Stock Exchange of New Zealand and it had no products and it had no revenues but we also have things that have products and revenues and real value and we ought to be applying that to this incredibly important task again right where I started into this is when I was in China, I was talking to them about how you engage in what we in our thing. Thanks called LeapFrog Technologies. How do you if you are developing country decide to get from the pre-industrial society to a post-industrial society without paying all the costs of industrialization has to say is there a way to have a telecommunication system that doesn't require you to place wires all over your country, which is incredibly expensive. And of course there is we've had an information revolution. So the vast majority of funds that are being sold in the world today are cellular phones are not wiring the developing world. That's all going to digital cellular technology and will increasingly be going to satellite technology do the same thing with energy precisely the same thing so you don't need to do all of the wires that make this stuff prohibitively expensive in a country like China or India or so. I'm talking to them about these kinds of theories of alternative development in the sky takes me aside after a few beers and explains to me why no one is rising up in a plaza saying this is a great vision. They said, you know, we are an incredibly poor country and we tried this once before we had something Called and I'd forgotten completely about it the Great Leap Forward. We were going to be doing a whole bunch of things very differently. We tried a whole bunch of things. The one that got all the visibility was making steel and little backyard still many mills. It was a disaster at set China back 10 years the economic cost of social cost of political class were enormous has no one's going to try that. Again. We can't afford another mistake like that. We desperately want to pursue the vision that you were talking about. But we want to be second. We could even be third we cannot afford to be first. That's America's role. Well, he's right. It should be America's role. I mean we led the world into the oil age. The first oil well in the world was in Titusville, Pennsylvania 1869. We tried to lead the world into the nuclear age and kind of fizzled there. But by God, we can lead the world into the solar age. We've got the smarts. We've got the technology. We've got the resources and the only question and it's a question for those of you in this room is whether we have the political will This is something where we have to rise up in unison as a country and demand of our political leaders that they place in context the framework that's going to get us there. Most politicians in America today should not be called leaders. The proper term should be followers. They take polls they find out where we're going and then they do everything they can to race out and get in front of the parade. Well, we've got to do is create a parade and then let them get out in front of it unless we change our ways beyond a shadow of a dolt a Calamity will result but you people here have the spirit the drive-in you're in the country that is going to either lead or fail to lead a necessary development human history, and if you'll get off your Duff sand work hard, we'll make the right choice. So do it. Thank you. (00:35:17) That was Dennis Hayes the national coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970 and the current chairman of the Earth Day Network the group that's coordinating. Tomorrow's events. Hey spoke about Earth Day 2000 and called for clean energy use at st. Paul's Hamline University in March after his speech Hayes answered questions from the audience. (00:35:40) I have a guess a comment and a question. I'm concerned mainly with transportation and the just the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are released through automobile traffic and and mass transit and One of the things that I'm wondering about is if anyone's looked at at coming up with a program to offer Financial incentives for people to reduce their (00:36:07) driving none has been spectacularly successful so far but there are tax advantages federally and some tax advantages in many states. I would be almost startled if there weren't some here (00:36:16) in Minnesota. This is to reduce the number of miles traveled per year. I have a brother that has been working on this for several months in Wisconsin and he's developed a program that basically provides Financial incentives or rewards for people that reduce the number of miles that they drive in a year. So if you don't drive if you drive very little you get you get a positive feedback and it seems like that is a better approach than a negative, you know approach where you would tax people for driving more. (00:36:56) No, I don't know if something that Reading somebody's odometer and (00:36:59) giving them a credit on the basis of that would what I was talking about was something that moves people out of automobiles and onto (00:37:04) Public Transit making that in their (00:37:06) economics. Yeah, and in regards to that, do you really think that public transport Transit, you know, like trains for instance commuter trains would actually produce any kind of a savings in terms of emissions of greenhouse gases because I've seen studies that prove that basically prove the (00:37:27) opposite. Well, they tend to be studies of places where trains have been built and added to a community have relatively low ridership sand and have relatively little impact where they do have impact is where you've put them in a place like New York or Boston or Paris or Moscow and the community has grown up around them and then 50 years later. Everybody is arranged in a fashion that they are served by the public transit system as opposed to having to figure out some way to get to a fixed rail system, and I certainly not the total answer. It's something that has integrated communities where you can have a place to reside a place to work a place to recreate a place for your kids to go to school and church a store all compact within a neighborhood as opposed to segregating them out through zoning that makes it impossible to have them together and then connects these neighborhoods with some kind of a fixed rail system is a part. I think of the energy efficient future not the whole part the real unknown now, everything is unknown since I've been saying everything else with bold Assurance. I guess I'll say this with a shirt. I think that the real future in public transportation is going to be fuel cell buses buses that produce zero pollution have all the flexibility to be able to go wherever they want to the problem of the fixed rail system. Is it (00:38:37) something interrupts it you have a train that crashes you have a saboteur that set something up, you know something that goes wrong in the whole system's paralyzed (00:38:44) the wonderful thing about the transportation system we have right now is its organic go any place that you went to the downside is that you do it in a fashion that's dreadfully inefficient and enormously polluting. So if you can keep the advantages and use a different kind of propulsion I think it would be much more attractive. (00:39:00) I had three comments. My name is Nicola Schneider. First of all the airplanes that fly in the skies each aircraft major aircraft 707 or its equivalent (00:39:10) will pollute the equivalency of a hundred thousand automobile (00:39:16) burning fuels (00:39:18) the next point. I'd like to bring up (00:39:20) in Germany. They do have carbon dioxide Collective systems (00:39:25) where all of their waists are (00:39:27) now being incinerated through the carbon dioxide method using water (00:39:31) number three. I'd like to see a conservation of (00:39:34) water throughout the United States and studying in it letting it in on date our lands our communities our Fields our homes and our people we will need water and we are in a water shortage right now. The only thing is (00:39:49) we haven't put on our glasses to (00:39:50) see it yet. When are we going to have the capability the capacity and the will Regain our equilibrium to be able to live on this land. The answer is I don't know that we could (00:40:09) clearly we're doing a whole bunch of things that (00:40:11) is violative of (00:40:13) having water accumulating sink into (00:40:14) the water table or will be (00:40:16) purified and be usable and available Paving over the landscape. There are a number of things now that are coming on again is incentives. Some of them is land use requirements on the bass parts of smart growth projects is that you've got to allow water to percolate you got to do things that make it go through this but we've got an enormous distance to go on. I won't begin to pretend that we've done anything more than make the first small baby steps and just a handful of locations. It's our water policies are insane in that particular regard. We're not much worse than the rest of the world. Nobody's doing a good job on water. (00:40:50) Yeah, I want to get back to something you were saying about politicians taking polls and getting out in front and I want your thoughts about how do we make it easier for the bulk of people to accept this message? Because I go and talk to people about wind or about solar and they say it's flaky and I think we've got a perception problem out there among a large segment of the population. What thoughts do you have about how we cross that barrier? (00:41:21) Well, you know, I'm in this weird position where almost everything that I have done my entire life started out being flaky the most recent was of course recycling which in 1990 was the huge Triumph. I think of the Earth Day 1990 in the United States 1,000 new curbside recycling programs and 30 million little green gorillas going home from school to tell their parents to use them and transformed it from being a flaky California tie-dyed hippie thing to something that if you don't recycle today, you're viewed as pretty environmentally irresponsible across the entire country. I that that will happen with Renewables as well part of it is making a tangible getting images out that that electronic postcard that you're allowed to send that if you sign up for this thing that you can go into your website pick up the postcard sent it out to five more people that have taken it a big Wind Farm suddenly, that's not flaky anymore. That's cost effective energy that exists. It's helping the economy. Me of this state as the industry matures and as the context around it mature becomes an enormously important part of the income stream for agriculture. You get Farmers on your side and people don't think farming is flaky. This becomes solid. This is part of what we do. I don't mean to be (00:42:36) glib about this that I understand. This is a (00:42:39) serious issue for people who don't think about it much but once we've got these things up and visible and producing energy than then people are going to understand that that they have cost effective energy from something that runs entirely on Sunshine the produces no acid rain produces. No carbon dioxide produces. No nitrogen oxides produces, no radioactive wastes produces. No bomb grade materials operates at ambient temperatures has no moving parts that could possibly break and turns out electricity. Far from being flaky is one of the more wonderful things that the Earth has to ensure human Prosperity. We're not there, but I think that will not be a hard sell. (00:43:30) Overcoming the overcoming the barrier of public opposition, but once we get best past that is good. I think it will come down to money making you like is anything being done right now to promote the financial issue with say the oil companies and sort of tempting them with the financial incentives for promoting solar instead of oil. (00:43:57) I'm sorry, there's something in the sound system wasn't working. Well, but the question is is are there Financial incentives currently available to solar cell producers and others that would make (00:44:05) this more attractive for the sort of it instead of having the oil companies instead of promoting oil so much kind of tempting them in the way of (00:44:13) solar. Yeah. There are a variety of things that are out there some of them at the state level some things at the federal level both subsidized procurement. The President Clinton's million solar roofs initiative. Nothing that begins to move in the order of magnitude that I was talking about that will cause major players to build brand new facilities to dramatically reduce the costs, but there is there are some substantial incentives also internationally through the World Bank and through a Consortium of Foundations trying to get this stuff in a variety of places. It's inadequate, but we now have enough to know how to make the systems work. They're resilient. We've got Road experience and it's you know, you want to run a bunch of little tests before you A massive commitment, but we've been running a bunch of little tests now with little incentives for 30 years. I think now the time has come that we can jump into the pool on this one. Okay. The last (00:45:04) question here it is. I'm Larry Johnson and working the fuel ethanol industry. You mentioned earlier that the final fuel for fuel cells would be water where you would separate the oxygen and the hydrogen what would be the interim field for fuel cells? I think the fuel cells will be long before we have that ability to make the field. (00:45:27) Okay, an enormously important question and one that I'm is not going to probably let me go out with a (00:45:33) crescendo and I go get him (00:45:36) it's a so maybe I'll help design my own question and answer at the end just so we have a but but but but this is this is this is really important you find that all sorts of people characterized Technologies in ways that don't let you comprehend the downside the only look at the good side and this is something that we probably need to do with regard to fuel cells fuel cells need to have the fuel cells that were currently talking about need to have hydrogen that is combined chemically with oxygen and (00:46:09) produces electricity in the (00:46:10) process, but doesn't can burn doesn't combine the way that hydrogen and oxygen can burn if you've got a hydrogen torch in your just lighting it in the air. It is a different kind of reaction that that again doesn't involve moving Parts doesn't involve high temperatures. It's really quite a marvelous technology, but it needs And we don't have hydrogen stations down there for you to go fill up your car with hydrogen. So something needs to be out there as a hydrogen source that some kind of Technology aboard your automobile will strip the hydrogen out of and feed it into the fuel cell for the first generation or two of fuel cells is question was what is my guess that you're going to put in the tank of your automobile before we've created a hydrogen economy to allow a fuel cell to operate and this is anybody's guess clearly the automobile industry is counting up on it being gasoline and they're going to run something that looks a whole lot like a very small petroleum Refinery that's going to be sitting there next to the fuel cell in your car to strip the hydrogen out of gasoline and feed it into the cell that will be an advantage over an internal combustion engine much less polluting much more efficient, but pretty expensive pretty complicated a little bit prone to break down and gets past all these advantages of Simplicity that are one of the nice things about fuel cells if I could choose I would probably go with methanol as the interim step and the There is we don't have a methanol distribution system around the country either but we could set one up pretty easily and it would be very compatible with given filling stations. And all you require is is some company that's going to break rank step with the rest of the industry and actually start selling methanol. We've done that with Fleet purchases in California and a few other places. There are methanol Distribution Systems, but not enough by far for any it could be ethanol. It could be a variety of things but that would be my my personal guest probably made from natural gas. And in fact probably using corporate Affiliates of large natural gas companies to provide the distribution system for it. Let me having said that though close on a note that is slightly less academic that says this (00:48:17) We (00:48:18) environmentalists are always saying we have very little time left. We don't make this decision within the next 10 years and it's going to be too late. If we don't do it in the next five years is too late. We've got 20 years it was going to be I mean all these things are relatively arbitrary except with regard to threshold events or a certain irreversible things that you pass through something goes extinct than it's too late. All right. I (00:48:37) mean that's as a threshold event of (00:48:40) if you mow down a rain forest and you bring in heavy equipment and you take easily compacted soil and you turn it into Mikata and to which nothing can ever again grow. It's too late that was a threshold event. But with most of these other things there are arbitrary choices about when you're going to move them when you're not going to move and and with regard to climate we don't there are real uncertainties. We know that it's coming. We don't know what shape or what speed it's coming in, but we know we don't want to get there. Rather than say that we've got five years or it's all over what I want to say is that with each passing day correcting. What we've done is going to be more costly more complicated and more painful than it would be if we acted earlier we had enough information on this that we should have started pretty aggressively 20 years ago. We're in worse shape today now acting than we would have been if we'd done it then we will be in vastly worse shape 20 years from now if we haven't acted today acting today means not that some abstract thing is all going to come together and everything is going to change it means that a group of identified individuals are going to commit themselves to making this happen. You've heard a lot of people speak in the course of the evening and some of those introductions have been doing this stuff for the last 30 years. And if they were Boy Scouts instead of environmentalists, they would have merit badge sashes of drip all over their house and you live with all of the rewards of all of that incredible hard work It is time for a new generation to pick up the torch global climate change ought to have the same kind of muscle behind it that Earth Day 1970 had behind it. The person behind the microphone today ought to be like the person who was then a 24 year old but no one is going to hand you that torch. You need to make it you need to seize it and I hope for the young people in the audience. That's a commitment that you'll make it's your world. It sure kids world. It's up to you to save it. Thank you all very (00:50:45) much. (00:50:49) That was Dennis Hayes the national coordinator of the first Earth Day and the current chairman of the Earth Day Network the group that's coordinating. Tomorrow's events. His Hamline University. Speech was sponsored by the Minnesota project. Dennis Hayes is the author of the book the official Earth Day guide to planetary repair. Now, if you missed any of the speech you can hear it and a week's worth of middays at www.mptv.org. And for more information on Earth Day visit w-w-w dot or Earth Day. That's one word Earth Day dot net coming up on Mondays midday in the 12 noon hour. A very special mid day for all of us here at Minnesota Public Radio. It's going to be once again. Midday starring Bob Potter NPR Legend. Bob Potter is leaving in PR after 29 years. And if you tuned in midday at 12 noon on Monday, Bob will join Gary eichten to answer your questions about what the life of a big-time Radio Star is like that's coming up at noon on. Midday here on Minnesota Public Radio as it happens coming your way next then at 11:05. It's Dale Connelly reporting and 11:35 word of mouth with Chris Roberts. In the weather from Minnesota tonight a chance of showers in the North mostly clear in the South with lows in the 30s and 40s for tomorrow and just a chance of morning showers in the arrowhead partly cloudy around the rest of the state with highs ranging from 55 in the arrowhead 275 in Southwestern, Minnesota. You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio partly cloudy skies 54 degrees at knoo wfm 91.1 Minneapolis st. Paul and k + SW 91.7 FM Worthington Minnesota in the Twin Cities tonight clear skies and a low of 38 partly sunny tomorrow high of 72. It's 10 o'clock. As it happens is made available in the United States by Minnesota Public Radio with support from this public radio station and is distributed by PRI Public Radio International. Hello. I'm frozen be sitting in for Mary Lou Finn.