Fw: Climate Change Remarks
Sky (palmoni@lcc.net)
Wed, 08 Oct 97 22:49:06 PDT
|
| THE WHITE HOUSE
|
| 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;
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