Office of the Press Secretary
_______________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release October 6, 1997
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
DURING PRESENTATIONS AT
WHITE HOUSE CONFERENCE ON CLIMATE CHANGE
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.
THE PRESIDENT: Isn't there some evidence already that malaria
in nations and areas where it presently exists is becoming more
prevalent and moving to higher climate?
DR. LIVERMAN: Yes, there is some evidence that, for example,
there is more malaria at higher elevations in some developing
countries, and certainly there is some more anecdotal evidence of
malaria moving into the United States. That's partly climate,
but it's also because we have a much more mobile population today
than we had in the past.
THE PRESIDENT: Let me ask you one other question, because -- let
me go back to what I said in the beginning. This is one of the most
difficult problems of democracy because we get 100 percent of the
people to agree that it exists, and only 10 percent of the people have
experienced it and another 10 percent of the people can imagine it and,
therefore, are willing to deal with it. You still have to have to have
51 percent in order to develop any kind of political consensus for
doing anything, I think, commensurate with the need.
So would you say -- I have -- and I know this happens to a lot
of people -- but I had a number of people -- I had a young congressman
in to see me the other day who was a member of the Republican Party and
he said, you know, in my state we've had 300 year floods in 10 years.
I met a man over my vacation who said that he was moving away from the
place he had lived for a decade because it was a completely different
place than it had been just 10 years ago; it was hotter, there were
more mosquitoes, it was a very different and difficult place.
Do you believe that these anecdotal experiences are likely
related to climate change, or are they just basically people's
imagination?
DR. LIVERMAN: No, I actually think there is a scientific basis
for these perceptions of climate change; there's such an area I did
research in. And we've done very carefully structured scientific
surveys of farmers and of city dwellers that show that many people do
believe that the climate is changing -- whether it's a farmer in Mexico
or a resident of Los Angeles. We have a lot of studies where people do
believe it's changing, and in many cases it correlates with the type of
observed temperature changes that Tom Karl talks about.
So my feeling from my own work interviewing people is that many
people in this country do think that the climate is changing and are
concerned about it.
THE PRESIDENT: Dr. Karl, do you want to say anything?
DR. KARL: Yes, actually I think the anecdotal evidence is
consistent with the notion that although no single event is the
basis for saying global warming is taking place, if you look at
many of -- in fact, I have a number of statistics you might find
of some interest here. Just during 1996 , we had six states that
set their all-time annual precipitation amount -- not to belabor
it, but totals like 16 feet of rainfall in Oregon during the
year 1996; over eight feet of precipitation and Mt. Mansfield in
Vermont, and there are a number of other records like this.
These are the types of things that certainly have an impact
and I think people remember.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: If I could add a word to this, I noted
earlier James Lee Witt, who is head of FEMA here, he and I have gone
out, as he and the President have gone out frequently to the sites of
these disasters, and the budget for the consequences for the flooding
event and the other disaster events as well now reaches an average of
$1 billion a week in the United States.
You mentioned, Doctor, about malaria. One scientist was telling
us recently about a case of malaria that showed up in Detroit during a
month when the average temperature was a full six degrees warmer than
the 30-year average, and while of course you can't again say that's
the cause and that's the effect, the odds of diseases of that kind,
as Secretary Donna Shalala who is here, has told us, increase quite
dramatically.
The other thing I wanted to ask just briefly is, in terms of
the effects on human beings. The weather forecasters who were at
the White House last week talk about the heat index, the combination
of temperatures and humidity. And your presentation followed right
on Dr. Tom Karl's, and somebody was saying that the heat index here
in Washington, D.C., by the middle of the next century is predicted
to go from -- do you know the numbers, Dr. Karl?
DR. KARL: I think it's up to 105 or 110. I don't know the
exact numbers, but --
DR. LIVERMAN: It's under 100 now, and it's going to go to
about 105 on average, they think, during the summer months.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, we'll get some more on that.
(Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: We certainly will. (Laughter.) One reason I
believe this is occurring is that James Lee Witt is the only member
of my Cabinet who is actually disappointed when his budget goes up.
(Laughter.) And he's had a lot of disappointments these last five
years.
I'd like to now call on Donald Wilhite to talk about the
relationship -- we've heard about increased precipitation and I'd
like to ask him to talk about drought and the apparent paradox in
drought patterns and increased precipitation patterns and what
implications this might have for American agriculture, which is
a terribly important part of our economy and we have all been
counting on it being a very important part of our export economy
for the indefinite future.
DR. WILHITE: Thank you, Mr. President, Mr. Vice President.
I was asked to talk a little bit about -- give the dry talk, I guess,
of the presentation. (Laughter.) Each drought event I think is a
vivid reminder of our nation's continuing vulnerability to climactic
variations. If one can remember the severe drought of the late
1980s and the early 1990s, those resulted in severe economic and
environmental consequences in many parts of the country.
In 1988, for example, nearly 50 percent of this nation was
affected by severe drought and resulted in excesses of $15 billion
in agricultural losses in this country; a very dramatic number.
In 1996 we had a reoccurrence of drought in the Southwestern United
States, and this also resulted in severe economic and environmental
losses, a higher incidence of forest fires and so forth. This also
is of concern. In the state of Texas alone, impacts were in excess
of $5 billion.
Now, American agriculture, while technologically advanced,
is still subject to the sensitivity of weather conditions or the
vagaries of weather, the slide that's up on the screen now shows a
dramatic upward trend in corn yields since 1950 in the United States.
But note the deviations on that trend. Those deviations are largely
the result of variations in climate or extreme weather conditions.
Most of those are the result of drought events, some of those are
the result of excessively wet events which delayed or hampered
spring planting.
Drought also is of high incidence in a normal part of the climate
in virtually all portions of the country. This next diagram shows the
incidence of drought in the United States over the last 10 years. So
while it's true we've had maybe an increase in precipitation, I think
it's interesting to note from this slide which shows the number of
years experiencing moderate, severe or extreme drought in the last 10,
that while you have a rather surprisingly large area in the Western
United States that shows a high incidence of drought, we are also
demonstrating the high incidence of drought in the Great Plains states,
in the Southwest, in the Midwest and also along the Eastern Coastal
states.
So drought is clearly a phenomena that affects all portions of
the nation, not just the Western United States. So that projected
increases in temperature and a possible accelerated water cycle that
we've been hearing about this morning may lead to changes in both the
amount and the seasonal distribution of precipitation which may alter
then the incidence of drought events and also flood events in this
country.
So while we don't know precisely what the regional impacts of
climate change may be, as Dr. Liverman was speaking about a few moments
ago, we do know the impacts associated with these extreme weather
events, and we also know where our vulnerabilities are as a result of
this. And I think it's prudent that we sort of assess what our
vulnerabilities are and use these as a way to reduce the impacts of
drought events and flood events today that will help us in the future.
THE PRESIDENT: I want to ask a question and try to make sure
that are all as clear as we can be based on what is known about two
apparently contradictory things. That is that the total volume of
precipitation has increased virtually everywhere and the number and
severity of droughts has increased across the country.
Now, Dr. Karl said earlier that part of the explanation is that
the precipitation we're getting is coming in bigger bursts. But what
I would like to do is have somebody offer basically a line of
explanation that everyone in the audience and hopefully those who will
be following these proceedings can understand, why did it happen at the
same time that we had more drought and more floods? How could we have
more droughts when the aggregate amount of precipitation on an annual
basis was increased? And I think it's important that people kind of
"get" why that happens.
DR. WILHITE: Well, I'll take a first shot at that. First of
all, the increased precipitation amount that Tom Karl was referencing
earlier, a lot of this increased precipitation is coming in the form
of short-term, intense precipitation events which leads to very high
runoff. So there's not a lot of moisture that goes into the soil.
Secondly, increasing temperatures tends to increase evaporation
and, therefore, the resulting impact of that is soil drying. So you
have a combination of these things going on that help to explain this
paradox.
THE PRESIDENT: So I think that's important. When the
temperatures warm, they dry the soil and create the conditions
for the floods simultaneously.
DR. WILHITE: That's correct.
THE PRESIDENT: And because these floods don't wash away the
soil, rather than sink down into the soil, you get very little benefit
out of them, and farmers lose a lot of topsoil.
THE PRESIDENT: Let me ask you a follow-up question, and
perhaps someone else would like to answer. But I think it's important
again -- and forgive -- for those of you in the audience who know a lot
more about this than I do, you will have to forgive me, but I'm also
trying to imagine how this is going to be absorbed by our nation and
by people who will be following this.
It appears that we are headed into a powerful El Nino, and I
wonder if one of you would just simply very briefly explain what that
is and whether you believe there is a link between the power of the
El Nino and climate change.
DR. WATSON: Yes. Every two to seven years we have a phenomena
called "the El Nino phenomena." The ocean temperatures off South
America in the Pacific warm up and they effectively have a large-scale
effect on temperature patterns and precipitation patterns throughout
the world. You get heavy rainfall in Peru, a drought in Northeast
Brazil, a drought in Zimbabwe, and major effects in countries such as
Australia.
One of the questions we have to ask ourselves is, are these
En Nino events changing? What we've observed in the last 20 years
is we've now had the largest, most intense El Nino in 1982 and it's
looking like the one we have now may well be the most intense of the
last 200 years. The question is, are we changing the frequency and
the magnitude of these so-called El Nino events because of global
warming? We don't know. But just like there are more floods at the
moment and more droughts throughout the world, it is interesting to
note that as the greenhouse gas concentrations are increasing, it
does appear that the frequency and magnitude of these El Nino events
also seems to be changing, and they have profound effects, as I said
earlier, both on temperature and precipitation truly around the globe.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I would just like to comment on your
remarks concerning the skeptic. I personally believe we've had
experience with a form of skepticism that I think is similar to
this before. In 1964, the scientific community through the
Surgeon General's report said that smoking cigarettes causes
lung cancer. And for the last 33 years, up until this summer,
the CEOs of the tobacco companies said with a straight face and
seemingly no embarrassment, there is no link between smoking
cigarettes and lung cancer. Some scientists say even today the
exact causal relationship is very difficult to pin down because
science can't answer all of the questions. But it's abundantly
obvious that it does, and the President's been leading our country's
fight on that issue. And, thank goodness, eventually, the weight
of the pinion got to be such that most everybody except this very,
very tiny band became embarrassed to parrot that line anymore.
I think that the weight of evidence here is in the same category.
THE PRESIDENT: We've got to wrap up the first panel and get
on to the next one, but I'd like to ask -- I think I'd like to ask,
John, you to respond to this. If anyone else wishes to, you're
welcome to. I think there is a more sophisticated question to be
asked, although the Vice President is right, there still are some
people who claim that this scientific case that I have been
completely persuaded by has not been made. I think the more
difficult argument, John, goes something like this: Look, you
put all this stuff in the atmosphere and it stays there for
100 years at least, and maybe longer, and so what's the hurry?
In a democracy, it's very hard to artificially impose things on
people they can't tangibly feel, and so why shouldn't we just keep on
rocking along with the kind of technological progress we're making now
until there really is both better scientific information and completely
painless technological fixes that are apparent to all? Why shouldn't
we just wait until all doubt has been resolved and hopefully we have
even better technology? Because, after all, the full impact of
whatever we do if we start tomorrow won't be felt for a decade and
maybe even for a century.
Number one, if that's true, how quickly could we lower the
temperature of the planet below what it otherwise would be; and,
number two, what about the argument on the merits?
DR. HOLDREN: Mr. President, let me take a try at addressing
that. It's clear that the task that you and other policymakers face
in this situation is a tough one. Business as usual is what most
people are comfortable with. The difficulty is that our health and
our economic well-being are more dependent on climate than most
people think.
Human disruption of climate by greenhouse gas emissions is
almost certainly further along than most people think, and directly
addressing the point you were just making, reducing greenhouse gas
emissions enough to avert much larger disruption than experienced
so far is going to be more difficult than most people think. And
the longer we wait, the more we coast up that business-as-usual
trajectory, the more old-style technologies are going to be in place
in this country and around the world and the harder it is going to
be to get off of that track.
The goal of the framework convention on climate change to which
the United States is a party was ratified by the United States Senate
in 1992 is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that
prevents dangerous human interference in the climate system.
Now, there is no formal agreement yet about what constitutes
dangerous interference, but I know of very few analysts who have
looked seriously at the impact side of this question who think that
going beyond twice the preindustrial carbon dioxide concentration is
anything other than very dangerous. That would be about 550 parts
per million, compared to 365 parts per million today, 280 parts per
million preindustrial, and you saw earlier a simulation of the
considerable temperature changes that that would entail.
Now, the problem is that stopping even at that 550 part
per million level, twice preindustrial, is not going to be easy.
The curves that are on the screen now show future world emissions
of carbon dioxide under business as usual, which is the reddish
line at the top, and then under three trajectories that would
stabilize the concentration at levels ranging from 350 parts per
million on the bottom -- a little less than today's -- to 750
parts per million on the highest of the lines that bend over;
another orange one.
The green one in the middle is the 550 parts per million
trajectory, the trajectory that stabilizes at twice preindustrial
CO2. Now, that lowest trajectory might be the most desirable from
the standpoint of giving us the greatest assurance of avoiding
climatic changes that we really won't like, but it's virtually
not practical to get to that, and we're already past the point
where we can get to that trajectory. In fact, if you could see
the scale more clearly, you would see that that one requires the
emissions to go negative early in the next century, which is
particularly difficult to manage.
Now, the green trajectory that stabilizes at a doubling of
preindustrial carbon dioxide concentrations requires that global
emissions -- global emissions, not U.S., but worldwide including the
developing countries, start to decline already in about the year 2030,
and they do that from a peak in which average per capita emissions
worldwide would be only one-fifth of U.S. per capita emissions today.
That's going to be very hard to do and if we're going to do it we need
to start working on it today.
The problem basically is that the world energy economic system
is a lot like a supertanker under full power; it's got huge momentum
in the direction it's heading, it's very hard to steer, it's got very
bad brakes.
The science that has been summarized here this morning is telling
us that the supertanker is headed for a reef. We can tell the water is
getting shallower under the hull; even if we can't say exactly how far
we can go before the reef rips the bottom out of that tanker. Now, in
that situation, full speed ahead is clearly the wrong course. We need
to start slowing and steering away from the reef of unmanageable
degrees of climate change now. And since we're all in the same
supertanker, industrialized and less developed countries together,
we had better find ways to slow and to steer cooperatively rather
than bickering over who is holding the wheel.
We've got a lot of tools available to help us with that steering
effort. There are advanced technologies already on the shelf that can
help us dramatically increase the efficiency of energy and use and can
reduce sharply the emissions of carbon dioxide from energy supply. We
need only some sensible attention to reducing the barriers to the more
rapid and widespread diffusion of those advanced technologies already
on the shelf and there are new technologies that can be brought to the
point of applicability with expanded research and development that
would make increased energy efficiency and reduced carbon emissions
even more cost-effective.
But now I'm basically getting into parts of the story that other
panels are going to deal with later today and I'll leave that to them.
THE PRESIDENT: But I do want to make the following points.
Number one, we can't get to the green line unless there is a global
agreement that involves both the developing and the developed
countries. Number two, however, that's not an excuse for us to do
nothing because if we do something it will be better than it would
have been otherwise because we're still the biggest contributor
and will be until sometime well into the next century.
And, number three, based on everything we know, it will be
easier in some ways, particularly if they get the financial help
they need, for developing countries to choose a different energy
future in the first place than it will be for the developed
countries to make the adjustments, which is not to say we don't
have to make the adjustments, but to say that I have read a lot
of the press coverage and people saying, oh, well, we're just
using this for an excuse or we're not being fair to them or we
don't want them to have a chance to grow. That is not true.
The United States cannot maintain and enhance its own standard
of living unless the developing nations grow and grow rapidly.
We support that. But they can choose a different energy future,
and that has to be a part of this, but it's not an excuse for us to
do nothing, because whatever we do we're going to make it better for
ourselves and for the rest of the world than it otherwise would have
been.
But I think it's important to point out what John showed us
there on the green line. The green line -- it requires -- to reach
the green line, we have to have a worldwide action plan.
THE PRESIDENT: Let me just say before we go on to the
transportation sector, these presentations have been quite important.
I remember 20 years ago, more or less -- maybe a little less now,
I can't remember exactly when -- the Congress voted, or the federal
government at least required -- it might have been a regulatory
action -- that the new power plants not use natural gas anymore and
that we phase out of them because we grossly underestimated how much
natural gas we had and we thought we could go to clean coal because
we didn't want to build nuclear plants for all the reasons that
were clear.
And one of the biggest problems we face now in trying to make
a reasoned judgment about how quickly we can reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, and by how much, is the need not to be unfair to electric
utilities that have billions of dollars invested in government-approved
power plants that they have not yet fully amortized.
Therefore, insofar -- and this applies both to buildings and to
the utilities themselves about which these two speakers have spoken.
You can either conserve more in the production of electricity or you
can have the people who consume it conserve more or you can change
the basis on which the plants work, which is the most expensive way
to do it. Therefore, insofar as we can do more in terms of how much
electricity people use or how much waste heat you recover, either one
of those things is a far preferable -- far preferable alternative than
to change the basis on which plants that have already been built are
being amortized, and will generate huge amounts of saving at lower
costs if we can do it.
At the end of this session, we'll get around to sort of the
skeptical economist's take on the technological fix. We'll get
around to that later. But I just think it's important that we focus
on this specific issue, because if our goal is to minimize economic
dislocation, then having conservation by the end users, the people
who have the buildings, for example, whether their manufacturers or
residential buildings or otherwise business buildings, and having
recovery of waste heat are clear, I think, the preferable alternatives
and clearly the less expensive alternatives.
I'd like to call on Mary Good now, who was the Under Secretary
of Commerce for Technology in our administration for four years and
now is the managing member of Venture Capital Investors. I want her
to talk a little bit about the potential for technological advances
to reduce emissions in the transportation sector and to focus
particularly on the partnership for new generation vehicles that
we've been working on with the auto companies and the UAW since
this administration took office, and Mary had a lot to do with it.
There is also a huge debate here about how much we can do
how quickly, and we have to make the best judgment about this
in determining what to say about where we are in Kyoto, because
transportation, as Secretary Pena said, occupies such a large part
of this whole equation.
So, Mary, have at it. Tell me what I should say in Japan on
my visit.
THE PRESIDENT: I just wanted to make two brief points. The
leaders of the Big Three auto companies and the UAW came in to see us
last week, and they said they're going to meet their Partnership for
the Next Generation Vehicle goal. The real problem is, once they
develop a prototype, how quickly can it be mass-produced and how will
people buy it, and will they buy it at present fuel prices. We'll
come back to that at the end.
But one related question to that is, given Americans buying
habits and consumer preferences, don't we have to include these light
trucks and even heavy trucks in this Partnership for the Next
Generation Vehicle; don't we have to achieve significant fuel
efficiencies there as well if we have any hope of succeeding here.
The only point I want to make, Mary, is, you know, I'm big on
all kinds of fast rail research, but I hope tomorrow's headline isn't
"Clinton Advocates More Research on Levitation." (Laughter.) I don't
need that.
MS. GOOD: We'll have to explain it to them better.
THE PRESIDENT: I'd like to call on Michael Bonsignore now
to talk about the energy savings available through the use of more
high-efficiency products and systems, and also the potential for
environmental technology exports. What he has to say and how
applicable and expandable you believe it is has a lot to do with
whether this transition we're going through will be an economic plus,
a drag, or a wash. I personally have always believed it would be
a plus if we did it right. But I'd like to ask Michael to talk
about that.
THE PRESIDENT: We need to wrap up; we're running a little bit
late. But I wanted to just give everyone an opportunity to comment
on this. Mason was the only person, I think, who explicitly said that
in order to make this transition we need to raise the price of
carbon-based products. One of the difficulties we're having within
the administration in reaching a proper judgment about what position
to stake out in Kyoto relates to how various people are responding,
frankly, to the recommendations and the findings of the people coming
out of the energy labs, because they say, hey, look, what we know
already shows you that we have readily available technologies and
courses of action which would take a huge hunk out of -- right now,
with no great increased cost -- a huge hunk out of any attempt to,
let's say, flatten our greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels.
We just heard about it today. Look what you could do with power
plants. You can recapture the waste heat, two-thirds of that. You
can make buildings and manufacturing facilities and residences much
more energy efficient. You can make transportation much more energy
efficient. Besides that, we've got all these alternative sources of
fuel for electricity and transportation. I mean, it's all out there;
this is what we know now.
And then sooner or later, we're going to have the Partnership
for the Next Generation Vehicle. So the question is always, though,
who will buy this stuff. Right now, you can buy light bulbs -- every
one of us could have every light bulb in our home, right now, every
single one of them -- we'd have to pay 60 percent more for the light
bulb, but it would have three times the useful life. Therefore, you
just work it out, we'd pay more up front, we'd save more money in the
long run, and we'd use a whole lot less carbon. And why don't we do
it? Why do we have any other kind of light bulbs in our homes?
And that is the simplest example of the nature of the debate we
are now having. That is, in terms of get from here to where we want
to go, do we have to either raise the price of the product -- there
are only three or four things you can do -- you can raise the price
of the product to the consumers; you can lower the price of the
alternative thing you wish to be bought by the consumers; you can
create some new business opportunity through some market permit