 Welcome everybody. Hello, good afternoon. My name is Steve Kahl. I am a writer at the New Yorker magazine and president of the New America Foundation, and it is in both of those guises. That's my pleasure to welcome you. The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new writers and big ideas. The New Yorker is a magazine that has a lot of poetry and cartoons in it. As well as some great journalism by colleagues like Michael Specter. Thank you for being here today, and I am going to turn the panel over to Michael, who will introduce our speakers and the subject matter. But please greet them all now with a round of applause. Thank you. Thanks, Steve. So I am in fact Michael Specter, and on behalf of the New Yorker and the New American Foundation, I'm really happy that you've come today. I'm required to say this by law. Turn off your phone. Don't take pictures. Don't scream. Don't shout. We're going to talk for about an hour, and then there will be some time for questions, and then there will be a reception afterwards, and where everyone who is not already in possession of Dan Juergen's book The Quest can make up for it because it's a remarkable book, and I will drone on about that more later. We're here to talk about sustainability. By the way, my notes are on an iPad because I wanted to be sustainable, but Blair is a bad thing in sustainability. Anyway, we're here to talk about sustainability, which is a word that I think threatens to become as meaningless and overused as the term green. I usually don't know what those things mean, but I'll give it a shot. I have some really distinguished people in different but overlapping fields to discuss it, and I'm going to introduce them. I'm going to ask a question here and there, but I'm basically going to keep my head down because these people really do know what they're talking about. I'll start from over there. That man is Dan Barber. He is called the chef, which is like calling Yo-Yo Ma a guy who plays with wooded instruments. He is one of America's most innovative chefs, and if you've ever been to Blue Hill or Blue Hill at Stone Farms restaurants in New York and in Territown, you will know that. He's a brilliant chef, but that's not even actually his greatest talent. His greatest talent is to be a thinker about food and sustainability and how we grow food in a way that manages to feed us and not destroy the world. He has won all sorts of awards, including two James Beard Foundation awards for Best Chef, and in 2009 he was named to Time Magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people. Next is another Dan, Dan Jurgen, who is founder and chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and is perhaps the most knowledgeable independent voice on the use development implications of oil and other energy sources that we can find. His book The Prize, The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a PBS series seen by, like, every single person on earth twice. And his current book on energy and the remaking of the modern world, The Quest, just came out last month, and it's really remarkable, and you should read it if you read nothing else. And finally, Carol Browner, who many of you know and know about, she's a distinguished fellow, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. She was the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton Administration, and I think served in that role longer than any person ever has. True? Incredible. At the beginning of the Obama Administration, she was appointed the head of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change, where she no longer is, and we can talk about that. And we will talk about that. But they're really wonderful people, so I think we should just be grateful that they came. And I'm going to start with just a couple facts. And when we talk about sustainability, let's just say what we mean simply is the ability for humans to grow, to prosper, to live, to eat, and do it in such a way that it doesn't destroy the earth any more than we already have, so that we're actually doing some really significant things with fewer and fewer resources. It's not an easy thing to do, and it's particularly not easy because in the next 40, 50 pick your year, there are going to be 50% more people on this planet than there are now. And those 50% will need to be fed. In fact, we'll need to grow more food in the next 35 years than all the food that has been grown in the world between the beginning of settled mankind in the year 1500. So we're talking about a lot. And it's not just that there's a lot more people. They're going to be wealthier. Many of them will demand more protein, and that usually means more meat. Unfortunately, when people get prosperous, they eat like us, which is sad. But it means more competition for land, water, and energy. It will only get worse as the effect of climate change gets more apparent. And of course, what's true for food is true for energy. Developing world countries consume less. And Dan can correct me here, and I think he already has. But they consume about a quarter of the oil that developed world countries have consumed traditionally. It's getting up to half. Pretty soon it's going to be equal. As these people get richer, they drive cars. If you've been to India over time, you see this very clearly. The middle class does what middle classes do throughout the world. And those things are aspirational, and they are very expensive in terms of the environment. Now, the countries that are growing the fastest, China and India, are not countries that we can necessarily say, you know, you guys should really slow down. Because we've already destroyed the environment for 200 years, so we don't want you to have your term. And that's a problem, because when we talk about climate change and food production and all these issues, we're talking about global things. And one of the things I'm going to ask is, what can we do? You hear a lot of people in America say, well, China's not doing it, as if it would make it okay for us to just perform any sort of terrible environmental sin. And I don't think that's true. So to start, Dan Juergen's book, one of the many amazing things he says in it is that, you know, we now have a $65 trillion economy in this world. Possibly in two decades, we're going to have twice that. How are we going to get from here to there without using more resources, without taking more of the valuable water that is in rare supply, the oil, and without burning more fossil fuels than we do now, because we're already burning way too many by anyone's count. So why don't I just ask Dan that one, and then this will just be a... I won't ask specific questions of specific people. So this is just a pick-up on the theme. Yeah, I'm curious how you think we can possibly do that, because you're actually not a pessimist. First, let me say thank you to both the New Yorker and the New American Foundation, and to you for this opportunity to be together in this panel with both my co-panelists, and to sort out this question of sustainability. It is, as I found over the five years I was working in this book, there were three big questions, and they all kind of tie together with what you're saying. One is, how do you go from a 65 to 130 trillion dollar economy, because people are not going to be happy being told that they can't grow, and those countries are on a growth path. And indeed, just to give the number, in 2000, the developed world used twice as much oil as the developing world. Today it's even, it's going up. And I think of all this kind of statistics that struck me when I was writing this book, one of the most astonishing is that in going back into 2000, capturing the change that you're talking about, there were 17 million new cars sold in the United States, less than 2 million in China. Last year, 17 million new cars in China, 11 million in the United States, and that 17 million is going to go up. So that is the first challenge. There's energy security in both its classic and its new forms, and the UN report last week about Iran highlights that. And then the third one, which is you're getting at, how do you balance the environmental with the objectives, with the energy objectives, and do it in a rational way? And so those are the, for me, they're kind of three big energy questions, not a simple answer. We know renewables will grow, and they'll probably grow a lot. We have a potential, I think, to be twice as energy efficient as we are today. But when you look at what's happening in the rest of the world, when you look at China and India, renewables will grow, but so will, they're on the track to use more coal. So it's, so to me, the major changes in the energy system will probably actually come after 2030 because of the scale and the kind of complexity of the system. And so the next 20 years really will pose very sharply the questions you're talking about. One of the problems with all that, I think, is that these are political issues, as well as environmental issues. And in this country, it's no secret that we haven't been so great on the climate. And in fact, this administration, a liberal administration with the majority in both houses of Congress, was unable to get a meaningful climate change bill through Congress, which I personally, and I'll bet I'm not the only person here, found somewhat disappointing. Carol? Did you find it disappointing? I'm not blaming her. I think that kind of changes the moral and ethical issue of our generation. Generations before have certainly left to subsequent generations difficult problems. The Cuyahoga River was on fire. That led to the creation of the EPA. You had cities that were so full of smog you couldn't see across a skyline. Today's the 21st anniversary of the Modern Clean Air Act. I mean, we certainly have dealt with difficult pollution issues. Climate change is not a difficult pollution issue. It is a planet-altering threat. And we are... We could well be the first generation to lead to a subsequent generation of problem they can't solve. Running EPA, I had the opportunity to work with the best engineers, environmental engineers in the world. When sea level rises start to occur, there's not an engineer in the world who can turn that back. My appointment was obviously quite significant. I was very optimistic that we would be able to do something that we would be able to set a cap on greenhouse gas emissions that we would be able to find sort of a common-sense cost-effective way to achieve significant reductions. Politics being what it is, the health care bill took much longer, ran down the clock, sort of ate up whatever good will there might have been in Congress towards some sort of responsible energy legislation. But having said that, I am still, like Dan Jurgen, I am an ultimate optimist. I spend virtually every day now with young CEOs, with young companies that are figuring out new energy solutions. I was with 30 of them in London a couple weeks ago, today, another 25 of them. I mean, the list of companies sorting through how we really change our energy future is very, very exciting. I'm also... I'm encouraged by some of the things I was doing. I think it was a very important step that the State Department took on the Keystone Pipeline just last week. I think the commitment to cleaner cars, work that I began in the White House that is now continuing, Congress said get to 35 miles per gallon by model year 2020. We convinced the automobile companies to do 35.2 miles per gallon in 2016, and now the President is talking about 54 miles per gallon in 2025. Similarly, the commitment the President has made on mercury. You may think, well, that's a neurotoxin. That's good. We shouldn't have mercury emissions from our coal-fired power plants. But the truth of the matter is, if you set a tough mercury standard, what will happen is the 1950, 1960, even some of the early 1970 vintage coal-fired power plants will actually shut down, creating opportunities for some of the alternatives. Probably natural gas in the near term, but ultimately some of the renewables. I think the President will propose the first-ever greenhouse gas emission standards on coal-fired plants at the beginning of the New Year. So you may not have gotten the kind of comprehensive lay of the land that could have guided us for generations to come, but that doesn't mean important things aren't happening when it comes to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. I'll play the pessimist since you people are so upbeat. That's what I was getting at, right. And Dan Barber is a person who lives sustainability on this farm. It's one of the most remarkable ecosystems I've ever seen. And everything has a place. Nothing is misused. All the waste is recycled, either to the animals, from the animals into the ground in such a way that it's a nice loop. It's a small farm. It's a beautiful, small place. And my question is, because it's the same with energy, when we talk about there are solutions. There are wonderful solutions. Can they be scaled up to deal with the problems of the world? Yeah. This is the big question about sustainable agriculture and the kind of food system that Michael's talking about, which is really a movement. It's a social movement. And I would argue it's probably one of the most exciting the most exciting happening today. And I'm lucky to be a part of it and have the opportunity to indulge in experimenting with it on this old Rockefeller farm. I guess I would answer your question in sort of looking at the bigger picture from one perspective, which is what feeds the food, the large food system, the big food chain. The big food chain feeds while everyone talks about the exciting social movement and the regional local organic movement, it still only feeds about 6% of the population. So, 94% of us are eating from an industrial food chain. Whether that food is coming from California, Texas, Florida, or Mexico, or beyond is indisputable. The question I think for the future, and I don't really know how to define the future here, just like none of us can predict the price of oil. Otherwise we probably wouldn't be sitting here. But the big food chain runs on essentially three things and I'm a little bit reductive, but the three things would be cheap fuel, abundance of water, and fairly stable climate which we've enjoyed for the last three decades. In fact the UN report came out last year that said that since 1960 we've enjoyed the most stable climate in 2,000 years. That was the Green Revolution from 1960 to 1980 was essentially the Green Revolution. The big food chain has been able to take advantage of some of these free ecological resources that allow food to be cheap, allow food to travel long distances. I guess my position I'm taking a position because I'm sitting here, but my contention is that the future of how we feed is going to change dramatically because those free ecological resources are not going to be as readily available whether or not there's peak oil or peak water or peak phosphorus. At some point we're going to run into a situation where those resources are more expensive and the cost of producing food in an industrialized regime is not going to be cheap. It's not cheap on the environmental degradation issues. It's also not cheap on the health issues as we've seen also indisputably. But from a pure economic standpoint just the P and L of looking at this thing is like the inputs are going to be vastly more expensive. And the question I think why we're in such an important time is because we have a decision to make about the future. How do we transition gracefully into a world that cannot produce food with these free ecological resources? How can we look at the future, by the way, whether this future is in our lifetime or our children's lifetime or our grandchildren's lifetime is also sort of a meaningless point, a meaningless question it's a blip on the biological scale. From a biological point of view it's coming into our future. So the question is how gracefully do we transition to a world where those free ecological resources are more expensive? And I think that's the challenge. From my perspective and here I won't be the pessimist I'll be the optimist. It's a nice challenge because if you believe that the big food chain is going to face these issues and as we are seeing already, not facing them well, I just came someone just sent me the Pilgrim's Pride report that came out last year. Pilgrim's Pride is the number two poultry producer in the world. The CEO said that this year they've lost 400 million dollars and they've lost 400 million dollars, he said, because of the price of oil. The price of oil is $96 a barrel. The predictions of that going very far north. The big food chain is built on $30 a barrel. Not $90 a barrel and not $130 a barrel. So where does this go? So my feeling is it's going to go in a direction of more by not because of chefs like me and not because of writers like Michael Pollan and chefs like Alice Waters, simply because of the economics we are going to look at a future of more local regionalized food and I believe that you will end up eating healthier and much more flavorful food because of that. Can I ask you one point of clarification? You can ask him anything you like. The fact that I would be clarifying something for you is ironic. If you use the word change, I'd like to use change in another way. Just to help all of us in the audience, all of us here. So you're 94%, 6%. So tell us which side Whole Foods is on. And you're being recorded now. Are we being sponsored is the question. That happened to me last week. I spoke about Whole Foods and I didn't know they were a sponsor. Although there is a Whole Foods I didn't know that I'm putting you in a hot seat. Well, the Whole Foods sort of toes the line. And I think they do it brilliantly. They are heavily invested in the industrial organic food chain which is yet another way to look at this is the principles behind sustainability let's say organic. Organic was founded on organism, on the whole gestalt. To Michael's point if we haven't dumbed down sustainability yet we've definitely dumbed down the word organic. And so corporations take advantage of that. And I don't know that that means that Whole Foods is evil or off on the wrong track. I think they are trying to bring to the world food at a price that albeit expensive compared to the big food chain at this point. They're doing a good job and they're also supporting local farmers. So they have their hand I think in both. I don't know that Whole Foods is the vision for the future of agriculture only because of what I said. They too take advantage of the free ecological resources and when those resources are less are more expensive and less readily available it's going to be a different situation. So can I ask a question? Oh God please. It must be that it's the dinner hour and we're all hungry so we want to talk to the chef. 20 years from now what we most of us probably live on the east coast, the northeast coast 20, 30 years from now what will Thanksgiving dinner be? I think I really believe Thanksgiving dinner will be a local regional repast that will be more delicious. I really believe that and I think the thing that's the shiv here again is the economics of it. Let me just tell you. So what would that mean? What would it be exactly? What would it be on my dinner table? I think instead of eating a pomegranate glazed turkey you'd probably be eating an apple and pear glazed turkey which some people do now but I think the economics of it are going to force you to So I'd still be eating turkey? Well I think you'd be eating turkey no it's a good question and to take it further I think you'd be eating a turkey you might not be eating two turkeys for a table of 12 you might be eating one because I think the turkey is going to be about 30 or 40% more expensive I think you're going to enjoy it more I think you're going to be satiated more literally because it gets in the realm of philosophical how do we enjoy food and how do we feel full and satiated but I do believe that and Mike was just telling me he's bought a red bourbon turkey for his Thanksgiving table he's going to pay 30% or 40% more today and I do believe that you're going to have a happy experience and I do believe that you're going to eat a little bit less of it because I really believe that those flavors satiate you in a way that an industrial big blown up turkey and if you cook it I think others well it's not about the cooking unfortunately I wish I look I have an ego about my cooking I'm great cooking but I don't think I can cook a broad breasted white turkey which is the industrial turkey that's what 98% of our turkeys are going to be 98% is one breed of turkey that's essentially relying on those cheap ecological resources but here's the thing and this is about oil and food and everything else which we go into alternatives and yeah I bought a red bourbon turkey and it's a heritage turkey and it eats grass and I have enough money to do that and I'm a food fetishist so fine but you know we're not when we talk about alternatives and we agree that they're good or when we talk about alternative energy sources and there's some extremely exciting things going on in what I and Dan and others have sort of called this is an era of biology it's not an industrial era where we're going to be able to make things biologically and that means no fossil fuels it means a lot of ability to direct what we're doing and where we're doing it but it does hinge on this thing you said which is money because as long as people can afford oil and as long as it's there they're going to get it and they're not going to have the incentive there's lots of solar folks out there biology people wind people and there's more and more but they don't have the incentives that oil has even now I think that I think no no no look to make this very simple yes you know we're all fortunate we can go out and we can get the ecologically correct turkey or whatever other piece of food we want for dinner but I want to go back to something that Dan said about the sustainable agriculture movement which is small but I think it's real I have a 23 year old he belongs to the local CSA he only eats what he gets from it he is looking at building a house that will be off the grid and I share that only because this is how young people are thinking they do want to be in their communities they do want to live a more sustainable life and I've been part of what was the green environmental movement meaning go out and save land back in the 60 then it became the pollution movement in the 70s and 80s and today it's the energy the climate change movement but something is happening with young people and I think you were referencing that that is hugely important about community because if we start to take our food from community it will be a very different type of food we will eat and also the impacts it will have broadly speaking from an environmental perspective from an energy perspective will be very different but I feel like we're talking about you know the Hudson Valley and Silver Spring Maryland and places like that and I'm concerned about you know two million people go to bed hungry every night that number will probably rise and I don't necessarily think industrial factory farming is the answer to that problem but I don't think that a pasture raised black Angus cow that farmers let go to 1300 pounds which I saw last week at a wonderful farm near where I have a house that's luxurious but that's not going to be possible to sustain a life just any life for these people and my concern is where like how do we go from you know we live in a country where our biggest health food problems are that we have too many calories basically and we well I mean also you have to think about it you know a few centuries ago China and India were over half the world economy after World War II they were like 2% of the world economy and now they're on a growth thing that is just phenomenal and it's kind of changing many different things our most important relationship in the world today the United States is with China the energy system I think to me the turning point was the year 2004 when the world kind of woke up to the fact that China was not just a source of inexpensive goods not just a competitive manufacturer not just a lid on inflation but also a huge and growing market and that's when we started to see prices started to go up to reflect what was happening the only analogy to that was what happened in the late 60s and early 70s when you had the economic miracles in Japan and western Europe and the price of oil you know happened to coincide with the war in the Middle East and with the crisis that we know that we know historically or no remember but we're now at a similar point but even on a larger scale and it's just transformative and of course it affects food and all of it but it's this 20 million people a year moving from the country side to the city and they need housing they need transport, they need jobs and all of that requires energy and they also need food which they increasingly can't grow because they're living in the middle of giant cities what about alternative fuel there's so much written about it there's a lot of excitement do you think it can be more than a little bit of a blip of a health of subsidies or an enormous hike in the price of oil who's that directed to well it was to you but I'm going to let anyone answer so I the last part of the quest I have a whole section there trying to say where did this whole issue of climate change come from and I include Carol's famous exchange with Tom DeLay oh well verbatim carbon but it goes back to the 1770s in the Alps and then the section of the books followed is on the rebirth of renewables because we had a very immature technology that really went to some in the audience may remember into the valley of death in the 1990s and kind of hung on and then this rebirth started, it started in Germany because of their feed-in tariffs and I think the about the renewable industry we've got to separate wind and solar solar may indeed be the ultimate answer cost has got to come down right now solar is 0.5% of our electricity wind is you know is much bigger but the solar costs are coming down very fast and so that can change but so the way I think of it now is that renewables unlike 20 or 30 years ago are a big business but they're also a small business when you measure them against the scale of the overall energy industry and what they are going to continue to need is to get to scale and to be competitive at scale to really be able to change things but you look at China if we just go back to it for a second I had a discussion with one of the senior Chinese energy guys and he was saying that these winds in the northwest which are really fierce he said we used to regard them as a natural disaster now we regard them as a precious resource and so they're harnessing it but you look at China what they're doing is they're kind of moving on all fronts but so it's going to be a bigger business but I think as we see now you know and kind of the we've seen kind of a bounce back from it I think in Europe certainly Spain is not going to be able to support solar in the way it has so the fiscal problems of governments will do it on the other hand we see a lot of momentum and I'll just say I'm on the energy initiative board at MIT and five or six years ago there was no energy club now there's an energy club with 2,500 people in it to me that's very significant for the long term. You asked about government support and I think that we have a long history in this country of supporting nascent industries through various tax policies etc through direct investments and tax policies and giving the oil industry tax breaks since the I think 1918 to the tune of today four billion dollars that continues today so the idea that we're not going to invest in renewables that we're not going to invest in solar geothermal wind it strikes me as odd and certainly not in keeping with our history similarly we've supported the nuclear industry since 1940 Daniel mentioned the solar industry you know industries are tiny they are growing as a proportion as a percentage rapidly so for example the United States was a net exporter of solar technology in 2010 in fact we exported even to China now if we're going to maintain that it's going to require some sort of government policies here in the United States that will give people who want to build the panels and want to build the turbines a market certainty and what is that it's a renewable electricity standard a clean energy standard you talk to any of the big manufacturers of renewable technology and what they will tell you is they are going to build it where they know they can sell it and China is creating a set of policies that is giving them a guaranteed market a guaranteed return on the investments they make in manufacturing we can do exactly the same thing here in the United States you know we haven't chose to do that thus far some states have chosen to do it but certainly I think it's important Tom DeLay Tom DeLay and I got into this rather heated fight when I was running the EPA where he essentially says to me you're regulating greenhouse gases and we went back and forth for a while and I finally said I don't even know the clean air act now remember this is the mid 90s allows EPA to regulate greenhouse gases the words greenhouse gases actually don't appear in the 1990 amendments to the clean air act to which Tom DeLay said well you should write me a memo you should do the legal analysis long story short we did the legal analysis we made a determination that if greenhouse gases endanger public health and the environment then EPA had an obligation to regulate them we sent the memo over we updated it before I left office the end of the story is there was a Supreme Court decision about three years ago embracing our analysis of the Clean Air Act so Tom DeLay probably shouldn't have asked that question because it then forms a Supreme Court decision which is how the Obama administration comes to regulate greenhouse gases from cars and that ultimately will lead to regulating greenhouse gases from all other sources but this is one of these things and be careful what you ask for here it is I wanted to ask and I have your quote that's great you know if you look at water which I think is instructive we used to use an endless amount of it in this country we still use a lot but we don't in California they're extremely precise about the way they use water and crops and a lot of that is after the Clean Water Act that factories began to be penalized for using and abusing water and they figured out ways to do it cleanly do we have to do that more for one thing can we talk about moving just in the food sector 6% seems like a nice boutique number by the way it was 3% 10 years ago so the fact that it's 6% is a big I'm with you and Apple computer used to sell 4% and now they sell most of the laptops but it can happen this reminds me is that the gist of the question yes that's the gist jump in the gun just a reminder of a conversation that I went to speak at a conference and I grew up and I was followed by Bill Gates I gave a little bit of a history and a talk about what we were doing at the Rockefeller farm and Mr. Gates followed me watch it watch it and he gave his vision of the future of agriculture and how to feed 9 billion people by 2050 and it was a really interesting talk I was waving my hand in the back and I wanted to ask about these free ecological resources that I just mentioned to you he didn't pick me but we left I was with my wife and we walked outside and all of a sudden Bill Gates passed right in front of me my wife being my wife pushed me into Bill Gates to ask this question and I was walking up the stairs and I was nervous and I thought this is my chance so I turned to him as we were walking up and I said Mr. Gates I'm really impressed with your thoughts about the future of agriculture and feeding a growing population my question for you and he really wasn't looking at me at all he was like boom up the stairs and we got to the stairs and I said my question is what's going to happen to some of these technological innovation hardy future basically he was advocating for genetic modification of seeds for the future of feeding the world and I said what's going to happen when these free ecological resources are no longer there to power your technology and he stopped and all of a sudden 50 people around us with cameras and he looked at me and he said what the hell is a free ecological resource and I said water as an example and he said yeah maybe but I don't think of that as an issue because look at what's happened with drip irrigation have you ever heard of drip irrigation what he asked me and I had and he said do you know that drip irrigation has cut water usage by 85% in Iowa alone for 25 years and he went on to make another point and actually he didn't let me answer he rounded the corner and he donated $10 billion to malaria research it's not like Bill Gates is a bad guy or anything but what I would have answered and I'm sorry it took so long to get to but what I would have said to him is that it's true about drip irrigation and it's an amazing technology and it's being used all throughout the world it was developed in Israel in the 60s and what I would have said to him had I had the chance is that we didn't have drip irrigation in Iowa before 1968 there was no irrigation at all in Iowa before 1965 why? because Iowa's growing organic grains for the most part and for the most part the soils retained water when it rained so it's an interesting way again it comes down to sort of how do you look at this future I mean yeah you're right these technologies that are impressive and are important and for some region of the world critically important for the foreseeable future but if we're really looking at the long-range view of this we have to both have a historical understanding and an appreciation for some of the real challenges we face with these these free services when I was secretary before I was at EPA I was born and raised there I was secretary of the environment for the state of Florida our economy in Florida is a tourism based economy so it's essentially based on clean water in the early 1990s the agricultural producers in the state still did not meter, I'm not saying pay for meter their water use they were free to sink a well and use whatever water they thought important the draining of south Florida for development of the damage that's been done to the Everglades system we literally take fresh water and put it out to tide in Florida now we're trying to reverse that and it struck me one day when I was traveling through the Everglades secretary of the environment that if Texas had been doing this with their oil the entire world would have thought they were crazy and nobody thought we were crazy taking the very thing that our economy is based on in Florida and simply getting rid of it you mentioned the issue of the clean water act I think the clean water act is a very very important environmental law dates back to the early 70s the modern clean water act congress hasn't gotten around to updating it since then but what's important to know about it is it solely focuses on quality not quantity and the idea that you could have it was an important law in terms of improving the Cuyahoga river is not on fire anymore but the idea that there was a time in our thinking where quantity wasn't important only quality and today what we know is in many ways they're inextricably linked and yet we have been unable to change this national law so that we can actually provide safeguards against both for quality and for quantity so let's say that we are successful in being sustainable in this country whatever we individually think that means but developing a farming system that makes more sense than the one we have now using our energy resources in the most productive and least destructive ways where does that leave us with regard to climate change which is not an American issue it's an international issue and even if we were to do everything right and there's a great deal of American history that says that's unlikely how do we do we just let climate change happen and then there are a lot of crazy ideas about how to mitigate pumping all sorts of stuff into the atmosphere is that the answer? because it doesn't seem realistic to think that a world is going to get together and do the sensible thing well I think that we have to yes it is a global issue and yes it doesn't matter where the greenhouse gas emissions come from they affect all of us but that doesn't remove our responsibility and I think we have an important leadership in play I think we can bring to bear important technologies that will help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions I think that it has got to be not just a government effort an industry effort a scientific effort it also has to be an individual effort and one of the things I have been struck by throughout my career in government is the power of access to information that when we give individuals information they frequently will in fact make a better choice I have the same experience with good food that's exactly right and so when you explain to somebody that you know you can we all learn to read the labels on cans about how many calories and salt and all those kind of things that and we make different decisions you may care about calories someone else may care about salt but we have active information but thank god we have that information we love it right and they're trying to make it better and more usable imagine if you had the same information about how much energy you were using at any given time I won't say his name because he's a well known person and he might be embarrassed by the story but he had an energy audit done on his house and he found out that he has two stereo systems that one uses ten times the amount of energy as the other and his response is my experience of these two stereo systems is identical they both play music now I have information so what am I going to do I'm going to stop using the stereo system that uses a lot of energy and maybe I'll replace it with a more efficient one we haven't been willing thus far to give consumers access to information about energy juice now there's a lot of young companies out there starting to do it there's one that's about to give you an app on your iPhone so when my husband and I always have this fight honey turn down the air conditioner, honey turn up the heat whatever I can when I get to work and he hasn't done what he was supposed to do go on to my iPhone and regulate my thermostat from far away same thing is going to happen we're all going to have smart refrigerators we're going to have smart cars we're going to have smart appliances right now your refrigerator is cycling on and off all day long because it doesn't know when you open and close the door it will learn that you only open and close the door for two hours in the morning and one hour in the evening my refrigerator actually is slightly smart because I can press a vacation mode when I decide to go out of town for a few weeks I can push a button or for a day or two and it will change its energy use my food is all protected but it's no longer using the same amount of energy and so it's a long way of saying that information is going to be hugely important in addition to what governments need to do I totally agree don't you think and this is sort of what you've been talking about with water don't you think making people pay for things in the real world and now I'm thinking about a carbon tax which has not been a successful thing in this country we don't pay the real price of lots of things we have from a desk to the food we eat until we even know what the real price is I'm not sure we can make those intelligent decisions the environmental externalities are not actually put into the prices that we experience as consumers and that would certainly make a difference I wanted to ask you about China if I could because you had said something that's true that they're building a lot of coal-fired plants they're also kind of on the cutting edge of doing advanced alternative work yes I think they're kind of motto is they're doing everything and it goes back probably not many people here I don't know how many of you read George W. Bush's memoirs but in it don't insult us we don't read that but he has a story about he asked the president of China what do you worry about because he said I worry in the middle of the night about another terrorist attack he said the president of China said I worry about these 20 million people who are moving because that's social stability it's political stability it's everything and I think that that is when they look at energy that's their fundamental starting point but I do see some definite changes there number one they put efficiency at the top of their own objectives because from their own point of view you know they'll probably at the end of this decade use as much oil as the United States and they could keep going they don't want to do that so they want to be efficient after them because they've inherited these huge energy and efficient industries from the communist era from the former communist centrally planned era so they're doing that secondly they have under the new five-year plan they have all these industries new industries that they want to be leaders in many of them are basically energy environment oriented and I think starting around 2007 as Carol knows they started to change what they were saying about climate change and concerned about the impact so you see a process of change there and it is interesting that you know kind of what's happening with the electric car different countries you know maybe there are four countries that are really players in it the US, Japan, South Korea and China and they have somewhat different objectives in it I think the US it's climate but it's also rebirth of manufacturing and China it's I mean they talk about climate but I think it gets mixed in with their other problem which is we talked about environment getting worse in some ways the environment's gotten better I mean we have much cleaner air they don't that's a huge problem for them and it's a problem because everybody's breathing this really dirty air so they see the electric cars answering that they see it as answering the question of not having their oil consumption go out of control and I think there's a third interest that they've built up this large automobile industry now but they're unlikely to be able to catch up with the established players but they see the electric car as a way to kind of do an end run and sort of be at the front so a lot of different motivations come together in the way they're going forward I think there's a fifth one too I don't know if you would agree there is a small but nevertheless growing environmental movement and if you think about the environmental movement the anti-pollution movement in the United States it was really a product of the middle class that as people came to the cities they started to think about the quality of life they had time on their hands the 9 to 5 work day was really a reality they started to say wait just a moment we don't want this industrial pollution we don't want this dirty water this dirty air and so the EPA gets created by Richard Nixon in 1970 and so on and so forth I think you're starting to see some of that in China and I think in part because of the one child policy people are saying well I only have my kid needs to be safe and I don't want my kid to experience asthma and so as they come to the cities with all the negatives associated with coming to the cities I also think there's this sort of beginning of a really tiny but nevertheless potentially powerful environmental movement well I think absolutely if the quality of air I mean I hear from friends who live in you know Chinese live in China all the time and they're concerned and it's interesting because for me I remember you know growing up in Los Angeles when the smog was really terrible talked about it when I was out at the at the Ottawa Museum there and you know it's really painful to breathe well that started a movement and who set up the California Air Resources Board but Ronald Reagan and started a process of regulation and have the story of the scientists in there who actually figured out where smog came from and I think that you know part of the motive force in our country from the electric vehicle basically arises from that movement in California and to want to get to a zero emissions vehicle and it started basically in response to really terrible air pollution I think I actually want to ask each one ridiculous question then we'll take questions from the audience Dan Barber if you could have any one wish to supplement it towards making the world more sustainable just do it what is it I mean look my interest here is in flavor of food and I know that sounds next to these two colleagues kind of trivial and a little elitist and a feat and Eastern and all these other you forgot imputed you forgot imputed but I believe so I'm a chef and I should believe this but I believe it maybe even you know stronger than the next is that flavor if you are looking for truly delicious food I mean truly not fast food companies that tell you they make the best hamburger or the best taco I'm talking about truly delicious food you have behind you a whole host of environmental ecological nutritional even community activism work at hand the same thing I guess my wish is for people to appreciate to celebrate the hedonism aspect of delicious food because with it a delicious carrot or a delicious leg of lamb has with it these environmental decisions that add up to not just delicious food but a delicious future and I believe that very strongly it's a small way into this issue and it's difficult when you have overriding issues like global climate change and peak oil and the rest of these overbearing issues but one thing that we can all do in this room is vote for this kind of system that I'm referring to three times a day that's a very nice way to be in the world how many times we get to vote for a president once every four years so we get to vote three times a day for the kind of future that we want and we are generally powerless not to compare myself with the colleagues and make this into more of a imaginary statement that needs to be but we are generally powerless to deal with a lot of the issues they're talking about generally speaking of course we can vote the right way politically but for the every day and I say again three times a day we can vote with our forks and that's a very powerful statement six percent is a six percent of our food we're eating is a local or regional or sustainable in that sense it's an amazing number considering ten years ago I said it before I just stress it again and that's basically because of people like Michael Pollan and others who have brought to bear this issue and people are spending more and changing their habits because of it I think that's a very positive way to look at the future I think something that Dan said a little earlier quite quickly is that the food supply around the world is very much affected by what happens to the price of energy because the energy components directly and indirectly are so high and we should remember this discussion that what happens with energy can be disruptive not only of that some people think that the Arab Spring really started over the cost of food and outside the United States people are very aware of that but also how disruptive it can be in the global economy and every recession since 1973 has been associated with a eruption in oil prices and so I think there's a kind of energy security dimension we shouldn't forget and last week in addition to the Keystone XL decision the other thing that came out was the United Nations report on Iran's nuclear program which was no surprise probably to any country in the region but which did codify the stages or all the steps that Iran is going through and kind of ratcheted up the tension so we should remember that there's a security side of this too that can have very immediate impacts on everybody's life including their ability to actually pay for food whatever kind of food they're buying so I guess the kind of two things that I would kind of look for if you're talking big overarching things is in addition to the questions that I said about energy and environmental objectives is keeping the security dimension in mind and I do think that you know we're twice as energy efficient as a country as we were a couple decades ago and I think having that as kind of part of the DNA individuals, companies, national goals our economy's grown about two and a half times during that period that putting consistent emphasis on efficiency at least helps for the next 10 or 20 years to meet many of the most important considerations that we have there and it's not a penalty it can make us more productive Carol can any of this happen without an elected group of officials who support it well I would to go to the original question and I'll come quickly to that I would put a price a cap on carbon but I would also I'm fascinated by community and how do we form communities and I'm particularly fascinated by young people because they're finding new ways to form community and I think it's in communities where there are shared values that we actually generate change and whether it's you know I don't know about how many we're sort of all contemporaries I don't keep in touch with anybody I went to high school with because that involved writing a letter and putting it in an envelope and putting a stamp on it and mailing young people today are in touch with people they haven't seen in 10 years because there are mechanisms for doing that so it's this idea of giving people access to community creating communities that will then allow them to make informed decisions and quality decisions about the food they eat about how they live their lives the kind of transportation they use yes it does require a certain type of participation but the reasons are important participating in our small d-democratic process is hugely important my husband served in congress from the time he was 25 he was elected and left after 18 years actually the voters asked him to leave after 18 years it happens but the reason I mentioned this is when he was first elected in 1974 it cost about $60,000 to run for a congressional seat in New York so an expensive state cost about $3 million that's to run for a house seat and in many contested house seats what the candidates spend this year will not even be the big expense it will be the outside groups because of the supreme court decision and I worked in congress and I've been around politicians for a long time and I guess I'm sort of one but what's happened is because of this need to raise money to stay in office they have to go home they can no longer form relationships with their colleagues like they used to do they used to be able to hang out on the weekends they used to be able to play cards together go hunting do whatever it is they did and when you have relationships as we all know that's what gives you the opportunity to solve complicated problems they no longer most of the people I know who serve in congress no longer are able to form those relationships because they're simply not here they're at home they're out doing the fundraising it takes to stay in office and I think you know we've been all watching the super committee and what appears to be happening we only have the news reports is that they can't even seem to figure out how to have the kind of dialogue that will allow them to reach some sort of common ground and so if I had one big big wish is that we could return to a time when there really was a civil discourse in this country and where people could find common ground and that means forming the communities and the relationships that allow them to solve problems so at this point we could take some questions and I think there are mics strategically okay go ahead you are because I got in so late I got to sit at the seat right by the mic thanks so much for your very informative and insightful dialogue I really appreciate it I'm glad to be here my question really is for Dan but anybody who has thoughts on it sorry Dan but for you too if you would like you know Americans are eating more animal products per capita than we ever have in our history we eat more animal products per capita than almost any nation in the entire world and we see the results of it with public health problems obviously the environmental problems the UN says that animal agribusiness is one of the biggest causes of climate change why is there not so much discussion do you think on just encouraging people let's say to eat a more plant centered diet to eat more plants and fewer animals it seems like it would be a great way to prevent some of our public health prices environmental problems and prevent the whole staggering amount of animal cruelty as well well I think there has been a lot of talk about it but probably not enough and that's probably already your point that we could solve a lot if we we ate lower on the food chain it's very expensive to eat meat although it's not reflected at the checkout aisle of course so and as I was saying before I think it will be maybe in our lifetime anyway though I would be just a bit careful about it from some of the perspectives that you mentioned because look I'm coming from the Hudson Valley and the Hudson Valley is a very difficult place to grow vegetables and fruits almost impossible in most of the Hudson Valley to grow grains which is really what we eat when we talk about the most exciting social movement we talk about fruits and vegetables it's like nothing we eat grain we eat wheat for the most part I mean 80% of our farmland in this country is in grains that's the big issue the problem is that of the 80% something like 60% go to feed animals that's a very inefficient system so I agree with you we need to eat less meat but in the Hudson Valley if you believe in a localized food system and I really do from the economic standpoint from the health standpoint from the nutrition standpoint from the taste standpoint you've got to look at the full life cycle of an animal to start recommending diets for people and if you're going to look at the full life cycle of an animal in the Hudson Valley it's actually quite cheap to raise meat in the Hudson Valley you've got great grass amazing grass you can do a lot with animals in the harsh conditions of the winter storing that and feeding them at a very low energy cost at a very low economic cost look the Hudson Valley was built on dairy that's what built the beautiful iconic landscapes we ought to maybe take advantage of that more not less for the future I'm only using a ton of people that live in the Hudson Valley so I'm not extrapolating this example to say that we should all be eating more grass fed and grass finished local meat because the Hudson Valley's ecological conditions suggest that we should be raising cows there and not carrots and cabbages because we shouldn't be raising carrots and cabbages there economically I can tell you that it's very hard to do and the land is begging for the low-hanging fruit which is animals so in fact to answer your question and I say it a little controversially because I want to make the point is we should be eating more meat if you're from there more meat you should be eating more meat that's local that's fed on grass if you're in the animal not just the loin and the steaks you should be able to encourage chefs to be cooking all parts of the animal and you should be eating it in a way that supports your local ecology and supports the open space in the landscape if you're in Berkeley or you're in San Diego Southern California and you want to be a vegetarian you should be I really think you should be because the ecology is telling you that's what it should be so my overall point to you is we should be giving a prescription about what our diet should be on a national scale and certainly not on a global scale we should in fact do what the Native American Indians did so brilliantly which was ask the ecological conditions what should we be growing and then base our diet on that microclimate I think that's the future of eating because it's the least expensive and it's the most energy efficient and it's absolutely the most delicious great panel with the failure of the climate legislation one thing I've thought about is can we get pieces of a solution through I don't have some familiarity in the transportation sector don't know as much about others but I'm wondering if we can't cobble together things that are together we get you the kinds of numbers and I'll give you two examples in transportation I'm sure there's lots of others in other parts other sectors of the economy we now provide parking employers can deduct parking benefits to their employees and most employees 90 plus percent get free parking there's no requirement that they have to give their employees the option for cash and lieu of parking and that seems to be a very common sense approach you get a 12% reduction in drive alone to work second one is we require all but one state auto insurance if you Brookings in a major study if you required or had that insurance offered on a per mile basis you'd have an 8% reduction in driving so we've done a good job on the vehicle side of it I know there's been research in utilities and how to be smart meters and there's actually some more activity going on because there was some things I'm just wondering if we can't cobble together a package of a lot of these kinds of measures that might get reductions similar to the numbers of the failed legislation so I think the answer is absolutely yes and I actually think that the era of 1000, 2000, 3000 pages of legislation is over I think we saw that at the end of the healthcare debate and that what you could do is take discernible parts of a clean energy economy of a clean energy future and offer them so you could have a removal electricity standard or a clean energy standard you could have transportation requirements you could have energy efficiency requirements you could have building construction requirements and you might actually be able to form different coalitions of support so somebody who might not support a clean energy standard would support a building efficiency standard I also think as I said at the beginning there's a set of executive authorities existing authorities on the book which if they take full advantage of will achieve significant changes so and I think they will stay the course for example on sitting a 54, 55 mile per gallon car and what that will do is actually create new technology opportunities and with that certainty that car companies are going to have to look at new technologies you'll create an investment opportunity for some of these smaller companies who are looking at battery technology and sort of other solutions someone did a study of the Clean Air Act recently where they looked at what it cost industry to reduce its pollution and what the benefits writ large to American society was and the cost were essentially a dollar and the benefits 30 dollars and so what we've learned is through government action and through government regulation not just government financial support but actually through government requirements we're able to stimulate large scale investments that create jobs here in the United States and can bring us cleaner air or cleaner water and so yes I think your observation is exactly right I think we have time for a couple more questions and then there's going to be a reception and an opportunity for anyone to acquire Daniel's book and you should do that go ahead wait wait speak into that machine I heard that you established your vote as a consumer by purchasing but how do you become a stakeholder when you choose not to purchase when you choose that you should purchase less where you should not have something you somehow lose that vote and what would be the you mean how do you do that with food though because then you don't eat if you eat less if you don't eat meat so this I want to make sure I understand you're saying my point was you can affect change in the way that you want by voting with your fork and spending your dollars okay you agree with that but you're saying then how do you become a stakeholder when you're just a non-voter because you don't purchase or you choose to purchase less because we consume too much and cut down on the purchases right it's a good question but the answer is still it's a little straightforward but I think the answer still is that with the limited amount of money that you're choosing to spend towards your diet you're spending it very wisely and so what's wisely for me wisely is you're looking for the greatest nutrient density in what you're eating you better because if you're going to eat less you better make those calories count and the true nutrient density comes from soils that are that are made fertile without synthetic fuels they are the most healthy usually when they don't have to travel long distances and have a lot of frequent fire miles attached to their calories so you are generally even if you're spending less if you are spending wisely and again I don't think spending wisely you have to be like you know a monkish in the pejoratives you don't have to refuse the pleasures of food you can actually spend less and increase the value of the experience of eating and I agree with the increase the value of a community around a table with shared costs eating less and eating lower on the food chain does not mean less delicious if you're smart about it I think you can use those dollars very wisely and support a local food economy that is more than subsisting okay two more and then we can consume food wisely thank you for a very interesting discussion I want to return to the issue of externalities you know we focus a lot on global warming when we talk about the externalities of carbon-based fuels and we don't I don't think we focus enough on the health care effects of carbon-based fuels the externalities of when you talk about global warming are hard to measure are very far in some cases could be very far away whereas the health care costs even by the very own calculations of the government you know for instance on the couple of rules coming up are as much as a hundred million dollars a year and just one other thought before I ask my question which is that you know we talk about making solar you know competitive with say coal right now and the cost has to come down so my question really is is like if the external health care costs of carbon-based fuels are actually built into the cost of that would it already be competitive would solar already be competitive and alternatives which when you say the external well for instance the MAC rule which is about to come up the maximum technology on coal plants which if you know just talked about closing twenty thirty plants you know many of them would be closed right away or they would be closed a lot faster if they were required to put in maximum control technology that will cost some billions of dollars but what never gets calculated into the cost is the fact that seventeen thousand people a year die prematurely because of particular pollution caused by those plants that there are hundreds of thousands of additional asthma cases every year these are costs that are passed along to all of us in the form of higher health care insurance bills and higher Medicare and higher Medicaid bills and the carbon-based fuels never pick up those costs and you know we never talk about it in that way and you know we talk about the cap on global warming but whereas the real issues are in some ways close to the home it seems to me so I think this there's a bit of a debate going on in Washington right now it's a little bit I think below the radar screen but it's this whole issue of cost benefit analysis and I think that's part of what you're speaking to which is should agencies like EPA be limited in the decisions they make based on whether or not the benefits to society exceed the cost of reducing pollution now I litigated this question a decision I made at EPA was litigated all the way to the Supreme Court on this very question and I prevailed in my argument that no the law didn't require me to limit my public health decisions in terms of setting an ozone standard or the first ever fine particle standard to a cost benefit analysis and you're exactly right we should be embedding these but I just want to be clear that changing, shifting the decision making the policy decision making paradigm to a cost benefit analysis would be I think a very bad thing for our country because what has happened historically is when we first look at reducing a pollutant and we look at the cost associated to that we have no way of factoring in American innovation and ingenuity and so we overestimate what will actually cost to achieve a pollution reduction we similarly do not appreciate all of the benefits you talked about asthma cases avoided premature deaths avoided but you know what is the lost work days associated with the mom or the dad who has to take that child to the emergency room and one of the reasons we've made real progress on clean air is because we've been willing to say that it's not going to be about the cost it's going to be about clean air it's going to be about the science it's going to be about the benefits that we provide and so you're raising an important point about how we actually embed these in the decisions we make but we shouldn't limit the decisions we make when it comes to setting public health air or water pollution standards to an economic cost benefit analysis one last question ma'am yes great discussion I'm interested in the interest of not being too elitist looking at the way to expand this access Dan to healthful food and everything given what we've talked about is these increasing costs as we're all going forward in terms of energy and water etc all those inputs and I would be interested to hear yours and possibly Carol's ideas about possible policy mechanisms that could improve access for more people to this sort of food and I'm including urban agriculture and also changes to the industrial agriculture system why don't you start with the policy you know I I'll tell a quick story when I was at EPA now 10-12 years ago one of the things I attempted to do was regulate the waste from what are called CAFOs or combined animal feeding operations these very very large as Dan has talked about industrial and the response I got from some in the industry in the CAFO industry was well it's just animal waste and at one point I realized that one of these CAFOs was actually going to produce more waste more manure than a small city would produce and I thought could you imagine if EPA decided not to regulate the solid the waste water from a city people would think we'd have lost our mind waste is waste and shouldn't we be about regulating it and I think that you know there are ways to look at these kind of regulations that will cause the industry to have to think differently but it's a very inefficient tool in most instances for the kind of a if the outcome you want is sustainable agriculture trying to use existing regulatory tools I think will be a very challenged and arduous process I think going back to Dan and I have talked about I think in terms of community and really looking at what is it that the land in your community can actually provide you is a far more sensible and practical way to proceed I'm glad Carol said that because I do think there's some levers to pull especially with the farm bill which is being debated right now actually without our knowing what they're talking about and it's going to be decided without our knowing or being able to affect the process intelligently which is really too bad because a lot of what's written to your question about access and about availability actually about the entire food chain is in that legislation so that's unfortunate and I don't think it's going to change now we'll have to fight the fight in another five years or they always say that five years from now we're really going to have the food system we want from this but I agree I think the thing you learn from that we all learn from Obama was this is like this is bottom up his election is bottom up this food movement is bottom up it's not going to come from the top it's going to come from all of us demanding the kind of food we want for ourselves and for our children and I go back to Carol's point about community and one of the great unfortunate problems when it relates to food with this issue is that we Americans don't have a culture around great food we do not we never have a culture around great farming and agriculture this is one of the great lies the Jefferson yeoman farmer is a myth it was true for wet agriculture in like 13 colonies west of the Mississippi small land yeoman farmer thing makes no sense there's no water for it to begin with so our whole agriculture tradition is bad agriculture and our whole cultural tradition in terms of great food comes from other cultures is borrowed from other cultures which we've done quite well but unfortunately we've borrowed the celebratory foods and not the everyday foods so we have an obesity epidemic in part because of it I want to make sure we end here on a hopeful note and say that I do believe that you look at a Bill Gates vision of the future and a Kefo vision of the future and what you see in my mind is like the centuries billowing the black smoke in the 18th century and the new England the English revolution those feel very heavy now they feel very old and though there are a lot of interesting people talking about that as a vision for the future I don't think it's the way we're going to head I do believe that this regional local idea while sounding quaint especially when I say it is actually going to be very innovative there are a number of factors that are taking advantage of energy exchange on the farm between animals and vegetables principally creating these free energies that are there photosynthesis and energies from the waste of animals you have a resilient food system and a much more delicious one and I believe in our lifetime we'll be eating more of that and our Thanksgiving table will be more delicious one last word from Jim when I was those who have written books probably the hardest thing to write at the end is the conclusion because you have to say you have to sum it up and say what does it mean for your readers to spend this time with you and what does it mean for yourself and so I spend a lot of time on the quest thinking about the conclusion and I think it also ends on a hopeful note I hope a realistic note because when you look at the energy side of things you see there are a lot of risks there ranging from environmental to geopolitical we can just go through many others the hope is the fact that we've had this great revolution that started in the 18th century in terms of harnessing technology and what Carol is talking about I think is really central which is this notion that you know there's no reason that innovation is going to end innovation doesn't exist in a vacuum it responds to needs and I think the needs have been identified pretty clearly and innovation in energy takes longer than other fields it's not like Twitter or YouTube because and I think so often you know Silicon Valley went into energy in a big way in 2004 and then found out it takes longer takes a lot of capital and there's a lot of regulation it's not like starting Twitter but on the other hand what we do have so it takes longer to unfold but one of the things we have going for us I think is we talk a lot about globalization but we're seeing a globalization of innovation it's not just centered in this country it's centered also in those countries that you talk about that are the large consumers and they are also caught up in this process and so I think on that kind of positive note saying you know we're going to there are going to be surprises we can't say the timing and we're going to see the adaptation of technology just on the energy front now we see their major things that are changing in energy the result of innovation so I think that also to end like to say and you know a hopeful note so I don't know about you but I feel very privileged I've been here to listen to three extremely innovative people now you're all entitled to buy books and drink