Climate One At The Commonwealth Club

Water World Laurent Auguste, CEO, Veolia Water Americas Jonas Minton, Water Policy Advisor, Planning and Conservation League Jason Morrison, Program Director, Pacific Institute Wild weather and growing population are increasing stress on global fresh water supplies. Scientists project more extremes of both too much and not enough water in some places and times. In the United States, aging infrastructure is in need of upgrade, but cash-strapped governments have little appetite for big-ticket items these days. And then there’s the need to adapt California’s water capture and storage systems to the climate-driven "new normal." Is there a global water crisis? What role should corporations and governments play in stewarding water resources in the American West and in a growing and thirsty world? Join us for a look into the future of the essence of life. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on March 29, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone

Speaking Youth to Power Abigail Borah, student, SustainUS.org Tania Pulido, Green For All Fellow; Brower Youth Award winner Adarsha Shivakumar, Stanford student, litigation plaintiff From courtrooms to diplomatic enclaves, youth advocates are clamoring to make their voices heard. Climate Progress dubbed 21-year-old college student Abigail Borah the “Durban Climate Hero” by for her appeal for faster action at a recent UN climate conference. Other advocates are filing suits claiming the U.S. and state governments have a legal responsibility to protect the atmosphere for future generations. Join us for a conversation with youth trying to build a cleaner future starting now. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on March 26, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Going Local Dan Rosen, Founder and CEO, Solar Mosaic Michael Shuman, Author, Local Dollars Local Sense Andrew Swallow, Founder, Mixt Greens; Author, Mixt Salads: A Chef's Bold Creations After decades of globalization there’s a new current pulling the other direction. Local food caught on and now people are thinking about buying other products from another county instead of another continent. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on March 23, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

GM CEO Dan Akerson Dan Akerson, Chairman and CEO, General Motors THaving posted the most profitable year in it history, General Motors seeks to drive technology toward a cleaner future. GM CEO, Dan Akerson says the “new GM” wants to be part of environmental solutions not the problem. He also talks about the Chevy Volt, climate-driven business risk, and funding of the controversial Heartland Institute. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on March 7, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Durban to Rio Tom Heller, Executive Director, Climate Policy Initiative; Professor, Stanford Law School Marc Stuart, Co-Founder, EcoSecurities Mark Schapiro, Senior Correspondent, Center for Investigative Reporting None of the experts gathered for this Climate One conversation expect much to come from the United Nations climate change negotiations.That’s not to say they think action has stalled. Rather, the panel, which included an international environmental lawyer, a clean energy investor, and a muckraking journalist, say to expect countries to continue investing in clean energy and carbon-cutting projects within their borders. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on February 29, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cruising 55 Shad Balch, Environment and Energy Communications, General Motors Roland Hwang, Director of Transportation Programs, NRDC Mary Nichols, Chair, California Air Resources Board Chris Paulson, VP of Strategy, Coda Automotive Have regulators, environmentalists, and automakers reached détente on the need to boost the fuel efficiency of America’s vehicle fleet? If one judges by the bonhomie displayed on stage by California’s top climate official, a transportation advocate, and two auto-industry executives during this Climate One panel, the answer is a resounding yes.The panel convened two weeks after the California Air Resources Board unanimously approved new rules that will require nearly 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles to be on the road by 2025. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on February 13, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Power Plays: Media Roundtable David Baker, Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle Dana Hull, Reporter, San Jose Mercury News Cassandra Sweet, Reporter, Dow Jones Clean energy has boomed in recent years, but to guarantee its continued growth investors need stable, long-term policy support, according to three of the Bay Area’s leading energy journalists.The panel also warns consumers to brace themselves for higher energy prices, predicting that California drivers could be paying $5 per gallon for gas as early as this summer. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on February 3, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sun Spots David Hayes, Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Interior John Laird, Secretary, California Resources Agency David Festa, West Coast Vice President, Environmental Defense Fund Michael Hatfield, Director of Development, First Solar Can large solar farms and the California desert co-exist? Yes, says this expert panel, which includes state and federal policymakers, California Resources Agency Secretary John Laird and Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes; an environmental advocate, David Festa, with the Environmental Defense Fund; and a project developer, Michael Hatfield, with First Solar. All agree that the Obama administration is on the right track with its commitment to bring relevant stakeholders together early in the process and in its preference for reviewing projects on a landscape scale. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on January 30, 2012 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2011 has been marked by extreme weather. In the U.S. alone, a record dozen disasters caused more than $1 billion in damage. This, and the release last month of a special UN report on extreme weather, was the backdrop for this Climate One panel featuring three leading climate scientists. Chris Field, Professor of Environmental Earth Sciences, Stanford University, is Co-Chair of the IPCC working group that produced the extreme weather report. He says the report reached three main conclusions: that extreme weather events are increasing; that losses are increasing; and that there’s a lot we can do about it: “smart things that don’t necessarily cost a lot that can be protective of assets and protective of lives.” What the extreme weather events tell us, says Michael Oppenheimer, Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Princeton University, is that “the climate is changing, and we have to learn how to deal with that. The good news, as Chris said, is that there are a lot of specific examples where we hav

The Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication Dr. Richard Alley, Professor of Geosciences, Penn State The event is a moving tribute to the late Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider, as Richard Alley is honored as the inaugural winner of the Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication. Alley, the Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, is also host of the PBS documentary "Earth: The Operators Manual." Alley and Climate One’s Greg Dalton talk about the challenges confronting scientists who carry on Schneider’s legacy of communicating climate science to the public and policymakers. The intent of the PBS series and companion book, Alley says, is to present both the risks and opportunities presented by climate change, and to use different messengers to tell the story. “We’re hoping to communicate more, not only the imperatives of doing something, but the amazing opportunities that are out there,” he says. The go

Boom or Bust? Dan Miller, Managing Director, The Roda Group Climate change “is going to dominate our world in the next century. It’s a very big risk, but it’s also a tremendous opportunity, if we make the right choices,” says Dan Miller. Miller, Managing Director at the venture capital firm The Roda Group, notes here that climate change is also treated much differently than other global threats. We spend billions on counterterrorism, to combat AIDS and other infectious diseases, to prevent a nuclear reactor meltdown, “but these kinds of risks have very low probabilities of actually affecting you. Yet we still worry about them a lot and are willing to take government action to combat them.” “Climate change, on the other hand, if we don’t address it, has the likely outcome that it will have catastrophic effects for nearly everyone,” he says. After reciting a depressing list of climate change impacts that are likely to or are already damaging the Earth’s natural systems – among them sea-level rise, drought, wild

Sun Up Dan Shugar, CEO, Solaria Tom Dinwoodie, CTO, SunPower In the wake of the collapse of solar panel maker Solyndra, the solar industry has received front-page treatment for the first time. Unfortunately, most of the coverage has been negative and ill-informed. In danger of being lost, industry veterans Dan Shugar and Tom Dinwoodie tell this Climate One audience is the good news – that solar is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States. Dan Shugar, CEO, Solaria, offers a sense of the scale of the growth. “Solar is, for the last 10 years, the fastest-growing energy technology,” he says, recording 69% annually compounded growth, 10 years in a row. “Last year, our industry manufactured, shipped, and installed for homes, businesses, and power plants 17 gigawatts of power. That’s the daytime equivalent of what 17 nuclear power plants put out,” he says. Tom Dinwoodie, CTO, SunPower, adds that even assuming a slower annual growth rate, say 15%, solar could supply 100% of the United States’ electr

The Great Disruption Paul Gilding, Professor, Cambridge University Program for Sustainability Leadership Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute Growth as we’ve known it is over, say Paul Gilding and Richard Heinberg. “The idea that we can keep on growing the economy up against the physical limits of the Earth” – water, oil, and land – “is not physically possible,” says Gilding, author, The Great Disruption. “We’re in a trap really. If we grow the economy, then we’ll hit those limits again. Prices will go up. Oil prices will go up. Food prices will go up. And the economy will go down,” he says. “If we don’t grow the economy, we’re going to drown in debt. We’re going to take a while to find our way out of this morass that we’ve dug ourselves into.” Richard Heinberg, author, The End of Growth, has written that it took decades for nominal GDP to recover after the Great Depression. But the fallout of the Great Recession, he says, will be much worse. “I don’t think we’ll ever see growth the way we e

Energy Innovation: Overhaul or Tweak? Severin Borenstein, Co-director, Energy Institute, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley Richard Lester, Director, MIT Industrial Performance Center Dan Reicher, Executive Director, Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, Stanford America’s innovation engine is the envy of the world, yet it struggles to deploy new technology at the scale commensurate with its economic might. This panel of experts from three of the nation’s leading universities says that the U.S. risks falling behind if it refuses to address the technical, financial, and political barriers slowing energy innovation. Richard Lester, Director, MIT Industrial Performance Center, lays out what he calls the three waves of energy innovation: energy efficiency in this decade; the scaling of low- or de-carbonized energy supply technologies beginning in 2020 and running through about 2050; and breakthroughs we don’t even know about today, or may know about but are in the lab stage, but that can take deca

Executive Chairman, Ford Motor Co. It might sound strange coming from the scion of a family whose name is synonymous with cars, but Bill Ford is worried about a world with too many automobiles. “Even if we clean up our cars, 4 billion clean cars is still 4 billion cars,” he tells this Climate One audience. “Most everybody has been focused on CO2 and fossil fuels and the effect that has on us politically and environmentally. That’s absolutely an appropriate focus,” says William Clay Ford, Jr., Executive Chairman, Ford Motor Co. “But I have started to realize that there is this other looming issue lurking out there that nobody was focused on, and that’s what I started calling ‘global gridlock.’” In a world of 4 billion cars, “How are they going to move? How are we as mobility providers going to provide solutions, and not be part of the problem?,” he asks. His answer, to a large degree, is technology. Ford gives an example. His company is testing a fleet of demonstration vehicles outfitted with vehicle-to-vehicl

US Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) America should wean itself from foreign oil and invest in clean energy technologies and infrastructure. Join us for a broad conversation about what Congress could do to promote electric cars, create jobs and spur development of biofuels from forests and agricultural lands. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 26, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beyond Petroleum: Lessons from the Gulf of Mexico Bill Reilly, Co-Chair, National Oil Spill Commission Bob Graham, Co-Chair, National Oil Spill Commission More than a year after oil stopped gushing into the Gulf, the co-chairs of the commission tasked with investigating the Deepwater Horizon oil spill appear together in this Climate One panel to assess the nation’s response to the disaster. Bill Reilly and Bob Graham commend the Obama administration for overhauling regulation of the offshore oil industry, and praise the oil industry for initiating internal reforms, but they blast Congress for doing next to nothing to respond to the spill. Former EPA Administrator Bill Reilly says that the administration and the oil industry have heeded the call for reform. “The systemic reforms that we recommended are underway, certainly in the Interior Department under the direction of Michael Bromwich at BOEMRE and Secretary Salazar. They’ve issued any number of new rules on safety and environmental management that are long

Beyond Petroleum: Navy Seals Leading the Charge Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Energy & Installations Jeremy Carl, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University The U.S. military has ambitious plans to reduce its dangerous dependence on oil and other fossil fuels. Can the buying power of the Pentagon drive innovation in new energy technologies and create markets? This conversation explores how the U.S. Navy and other military branches can align their intellectual and financial capital to accelerate and broaden the transition to cleaner sources of electricity and transportation fuels for American forces and the American economy. This program was recorded in front of a live audience at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on October 21, 2011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Saltworks and Beyond Peter Calthorpe, Principal Architect, Peter Calthorpe Associates David Lewis, Executive Director, Save the Bay Jack Matthews, Mayor, San Mateo The debate over Saltworks, a proposal to build 12,000 homes on former salt ponds in Redwood City, is a harbinger of coming development fights in the age of climate change. In this October 18 Climate One debate, architect Peter Calthorpe argues that the need for housing in the San Francisco Bay Area is so great that infill development alone can’t meet demand; conservationist David Lewis counters that developing one of the region’s last unprotected wetlands is not worth the cost. “This is not a site for housing,” says Lewis, Executive Director, Save the Bay. “This one area in Redwood City was held onto by the Cargill Salt Company because they wanted to develop it,” he says. “They have no entitlement to develop it. The city’s general plan says it should remain as open space. It’s a priority area for acquisition by the federal wildlife refuge.” “I do h

On Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World Daniel Yergin, Executive Vice President and Chairman, IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; CNBC Global Energy Expert; Author, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World Bullish on technology’s ability to tap previously unreachable oil and gas, energy analyst Daniel Yergin tells this Climate One audience to expect the age of fossil fuels to continue well into this century. Yergin is author of The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil age The Prize. A pivotal year for Yergin is 2004 when, he says, the world woke up to the surge in energy demand in emerging markets, notably China. After Yergin’s opening remarks, Climate One’s Greg Dalton reads a 2010 statement from International Energy Agency Chief Economist Fatih Birol expressing concern over rising global oil demand and urging a transition from oil. Yes, the statement was reasonable, Yergin says,