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June 25, 2010 - Art Bell
02:37:44
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Environmental Disasters - Larry Schweiger
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From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippine Islands, that's 7,107 islands, a lot of them, huh?
Manila, hey, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are in the world, this It's Coast to Coast AM, and I'm Art Bell for George Norrie, who's taking a well-deserved break, night off and all the rest of that, and it's my pleasure indeed to be back this evening.
All the ABs are well, furred and otherwise.
Asia Bell, Asia Rainbell, actually, is now three years old, folks.
She became three on May 30th.
And so the usual proud daddy picture that I put up tonight...
is of Asia.
Let me explain something about Philippines.
We start school very, very early in the Philippines, unlike many parts of the world.
I mean, very, very early.
And she has started school.
So that is her school uniform.
She goes five days a week at three years old.
Can you believe that?
It's really amazing to me, but that's the way it's done over here.
And so there she is proudly exhibiting her school uniform.
Three years old already.
It seems impossible and yet true.
So much has happened, so much water under the bridge since we last talked so much oil into the Gulf.
I've been watching that like a daily horror story, and we'll get to more of that in a moment.
And tonight's guest will cover it as well.
In the personal life, a couple kind of cool things happened.
My wife and I both took our Philippine amateur radio tests.
Now, I don't have to do that because we have a reciprocal agreement with the United States here in the Philippines, so I have operating privileges anywho, but I wanted Philippine call so to get that I have to take a Philippine test which is what I did studied again took a test again and my wife did too and I'm confident we've passed though we haven't received word yet so I don't want to I guess I shouldn't jinx that huh then there's one other item in our personal lives as you know I'm in Manila in the Philippines and the capital city
We're thinking of taking a pretty good look at a city called Cebu.
We're going to fly down, take a look-see, and scout around for a house, and we just might move to Cebu.
It's in what's called Visayas, Central Philippines, and not south, not north, but in the middle.
It is an island, sort of a tropical paradise type island with white sand beaches all the way around it.
You can look it up on Google if you wish.
So, that may be in our fairly immediate future.
A move to a place called Cebu.
That's C-E-B-U.
We'll see.
It's on our minds.
Alright, looking around the world right now, never all that pleasant a thing to do.
BP says their relief well is on target.
They're drilling down, down, down, two and a half miles of rock between themselves and the spill, or I suppose a conjunction with the spilling well.
And then maybe they can stop it if they can hit it.
If.
And it is an if, you know.
Completion, they say, by mid-August, and their stock is tumbling just about as quickly.
Mounting costs over the disaster, the company's inability to plug the leak any sooner the first.
Now, this is just horrible news.
It's now a tropical depression.
Um, first one of the Atlantic season has formed in the Caribbean.
That's close by, folks.
Raising concerns about what might happen to the efforts ongoing to contain the oil if all this bad weather, which could, I suppose, by then be a hurricane, right?
Would force BP to abandon their efforts still too early to tell where the storm might go.
And how it might affect oil on and as we now know without question below the surface as well.
We just don't know what it'll do.
There's no way to know.
But it's the worst case scenario.
In my mind, all that oil and something pushing like a hurricane from the south, even a tropical storm from the south to the north.
And I looked at some of the possible tracks of this disturbance and it's going right up into the Gulf.
Now, the central track takes it pretty close to New Orleans.
If that occurs, of course, this is very early and it could end up nowhere near New Orleans.
So, I don't know.
It's just, it's so horrible.
The whole thing has been so horrible to watch and we can watch it here on CNN or Fox or any of the news networks.
And it's depressing.
As a matter of fact, I even get NBC Nightly News and I can watch that.
So like all of you, I have watched all of this unfold.
I haven't been on the air with you since it began.
But my God, what a mess.
And we're going to talk about it tonight.
An interesting thing occurred.
Al Gore was here in the Philippines.
I just happened to notice he was here in the Philippines giving a speech and I, you know, obviously too late by the time he's already here but nevertheless I called the network and they tried to get hold of Al Gore.
Would have been really cool to have him here in the studio here in the Philippines to talk to all of you.
Would that have been cool or what?
But it was not to be so Larry Schweiger is going to be here.
Larry Schweiger Is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation.
So, he'll kind of stand in for Al tonight.
In my lifetime, I've never seen anything like this, anything as horrible as this.
And it's, the way it's unfolded, I think has been pretty interesting.
Even though there have been a lot of beaches fouled.
The majority of the oil, the majority of the oil has still stayed out at sea in the Gulf.
Now, if something like a hurricane comes along, all bets are off.
Anyway, we'll talk more about all of that shortly.
Leaders apparently differ on how to nurture a global recovery.
Fresh from a congressional win on a financial overhaul, President Obama pressed world leaders on Friday to join him in backing stronger rules against banking abuses.
He made little headway, though, in his call for more stimulus, more to keep the world economy growing instead than most of the countries he spoke to.
would rather put deficit reduction first.
By the way, Drill Baby Drill Sarah Palin arrived at a California campus really stirring it up, of course.
In fact, she didn't really even have to do anything to stir it up.
Just her appearance stirred it up.
The Justice Department on Friday urged federal appeals courts to delay a judge's ruling overturning a drilling moratorium in the Gulf.
In court papers, the Obama administration said, The suspensions in deepwater drilling are crucially important to protect human health and the environment from yet another disaster.
Some people regard the stoppage of deepwater drilling as a disaster in itself, jobs-wise, and certainly the U.S.
is in trouble jobs-wise.
We've got a recovery on Wall Street, but not on Main Street.
A lot of people out of work.
I talked to a lot of friends back there in the U.S.
Bay, and things are not well.
People are out of work.
People are working part-time.
And so far, this is without a doubt a jobless recovery, if you want to call it that.
The Arizona governor said that most illegal immigrants are smuggling drugs.
Governor Jan Brewer said Friday, most illegal immigrants entering Arizona are being used to transport drugs across the border.
An assertion that critics slammed is exaggerated and racist.
Yeah, of course.
Brewer said the motivation of a lot, that's in quotes, a lot, not all, but a lot, of the illegal immigrants is to enter the United States and look for work, but the drug rings press them into duty as drug mules, and of course that is true.
They do.
So, that's the news.
Never very, I don't know, I don't look forward to reading the headlines most times to be honest with you.
Alright, Larry Schweiger is President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation.
He returned to the National Wildlife Federation in March of 2004 with a commitment to control the climate crisis and protect wildlife for our children's future.
The National Wildlife Federation is America's largest conservation organization with 47 affiliates and more than 4 million members and supporters.
Previously, Larry served for 8 years as President and CEO of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy Where he pioneered watershed restoration and promoted ecological research, land conservation, and community outreach.
Prior to that, Larry was the Executive Secretary of the Joint House-Senate Conservation Committee for the Pennsylvania General Assembly, Senior Vice President for Conservation Programs at National Wildlife Federation, and first Vice President of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
Larry is an active community leader, having served on more than 40 governing boards, commissions, and committees.
He currently serves on the boards of directors for the Alliance for Climate Protection.
The H. John Hines III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment and National Wildlife Federation Action Fund was selected as Pennsylvania's Environmental Professional of the Year in 2002.
Pittsburgher of the Year in 2000, that's a good one, received a Conservation Service Award from the Christian Environmental Association in September of 1995.
Larry's book on global warming and wildlife is entitled Last Chance Preserving Life on Earth.
It was released by Fulcrum Publishing in September of 2009 and indeed can be found on the web at www.nwf.org forward last chance.
That should be easy.
So Larry Schweiger will be with us in a moment.
Certainly, Larry Schweiger has the credentials to be doing what he's about to do, without any doubt.
I suspect he's an acquaintance of Al Gore.
Larry Schweiger, welcome to Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
It's good to be with you.
Thanks.
Thank you for being here.
And I'm not slaughtering your name, am I?
No, it's Schweiger.
That's to the right.
Good, good, good, good.
All right, I understand.
Well, let me ask you first.
Are you acquaintance of Al Gore's?
Sure, I serve on the Alliance for Climate Protection board with Al, and in fact, I'll be seeing him in Tennessee this weekend.
So we've worked together on various projects over the years, and we're currently trying real hard to get a climate bill passed in Washington.
Well, we'll talk a lot about that, I'm sure.
He was here in the Philippines, in fact, here in Manila recently, and that's what made me pick up the phone, call my producer and say, hey, Al Gore's here.
Wouldn't it be something to have him do a national show from Manila?
Can you brief me on why he was, do you know offhand why he was here?
Yeah, Al has been training people all over the world, actually, including a large contingent in Manila.
To actually do his slideshow, the so-called Inconvenient Truth slideshow that he's been famous for.
And he now has literally thousands of people from China to here in the U.S.
trained to speak and to do his slideshow and to help others understand the urgency of climate change.
So he's been doing a great job.
Really equipping so many people to carry the message forward and to do what we need to do to address the threat that risks our children's future.
Larry, you can understand that here in the Philippines, over on the other side of the world, being an island nation of 7,107 islands, or is that 7,106, 5, 4, 3, you know, we're concerned about that sort of thing.
Islands, or is that 7,106, 5, 4, 3, you know we're concerned about that sort of thing.
And we well should be.
And actually the joke of counting them down like that may not be such a joke at all.
A lot of them are beginning to peak under the water.
And we're beginning to have weather in this part of the world that It just shouldn't be.
And it's happening all over the world, Larry.
It's not just the Philippines.
It's not just Southeast Asia.
It's in the headlines every single day.
Flooding, flooding, flooding, it seems like, everywhere.
And I know that's a micro look at things, but it is apparent all over the world right now.
And it's not just that, but it seems like Mother Earth is acting up.
Volcanoes, earthquakes in numbers that I've Never imagined in my lifetime.
My wife asked me the other day, she's Filipino, she asked me, is this the end of the world?
I said, well, I have no idea.
But sometimes it feels that way, Larry.
Well, I think it's really important for folks to understand that when you turn up the dial on the thermostat on the planet, you are allowing more water vapor to go into the air, you're allowing The oceans to warm, obviously the glaciers on top of mountains to melt, and a number of other things begin to play out.
Scientists have been warning us now for 15 years that we're going to see more intense storms and that they're going to be having a greater and greater impact on our lives.
And you're absolutely right.
We're seeing a pattern of that all over the world.
Just in the last several weeks, we've seen several incidents of very heavy, you know, high-intensity rainfall and storm events.
Yeah, I don't know if they're covering it, but my God, China's going underwater.
Parts of China literally going underwater.
All right, now to the big one, Larry.
You've been just, I guess, down to the Gulf, and you've seen up close the oil disaster.
How did you tour?
What did you see, Larry?
Well, first of all, National Wildlife Federation has an office.
We work with a number of partners.
We've been doing this for a number of years to restore coastal wetlands in Louisiana.
The Louisiana coastline is a very, very important one for nature.
There's about 30% of our total coastal wetlands are located in Louisiana near the mouth of the Mississippi.
So we've been down there working with the communities to help restore wetlands And to find ways to get the federal and other support to restore those important systems that have been damaged over the years by oil development, by channelization, and by other alterations that do damage to the coastline, certainly climate change being one of them.
And so as this event started to unfold, We set up shop down in Venice, Louisiana, rented a place down there, and we've had staff continuously out on the water since almost the very beginning of this disaster.
And so I personally have been down there three separate times.
I have been out on the water I don't know how many different boat trips with media and others, scientists.
We've seen the oil spill from out on open water to into the marshes and into the beach and coastal areas and, sadly, into the wildlife refuges that occur there.
And as you have said earlier, most of the oil has not come ashore.
In fact, most of the oil has not been seen by most people because it's under the water.
So there's a lot more oil out there, there's a lot more damage to be done, and I too fear the approaching storm because it could in fact push the oil into the marshes in a way that few could imagine.
Larry, let's talk about under the water for a moment.
BP initially said that there were not Underwater plumes.
BP said it just ain't so.
Water and oil do not mix, and when they are together, oil will float to the surface.
All of it.
And there will not be, and there are not, you know, underwater plumes.
And then a lot of industrial scientists, one lady in particular whose name doesn't come to mind, went out into the Gulf and found the plumes underwater all over the place.
Yeah, you know, BP has made a lot of statements and that's certainly one that has been made that is just simply not true.
They have been injecting dispersants at the wellhead.
You may, if you watch the video of the of the spewing oil seed. Oh my gosh, Larry, we're already
at the bottom of the hour. I can't believe the time went that quickly. I hope the whole
program doesn't disappear that quickly. Larry, hold on. We'll be back after a break.
Larry Schweiger is my guest.
Great to have him here. He is President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife
Foundation from Manila in the Philippines. Yes, an island.
I'm Art Bell. Oh, voila, the other side of the world. Hi, everybody. My guest is Larry Schweiger,
who is indeed the Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation.
Very concerned about what's going on, as you might imagine.
I'm always astounded At the political anger that just spews forth like a Philippine volcano.
It's getting active.
You know, when you start talking about global warming, or you begin talking about anything environmental, it's like, boom!
Real anger.
Real anger.
Lies!
Lies!
Globalist!
On and on and on.
That's putting it mildly.
I'm paraphrasing.
I couldn't read a lot of what's being said.
It's so political.
It's pathetic.
Do you honestly not think this is going on?
Well, anyway, we've got things to do.
Ian Punnett is going to be here, I believe, tomorrow night, but he's also here right now to tell you about tomorrow night.
Good evening!
Art, you know, it's funny you should bring that up, and good evening to you.
In the first hour, we're going to revisit last week's guest.
We talked to Dr. Peter Ward, who's a professor at the University of Washington, about what's going on in the Gulf.
We talked about the possibility of this Gulf oil spill, what would have to be happening before this became a planet killer.
What would be the triggers?
What would have to be the dominoes that would have to fall?
And the subject came up about methane buildup in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of all this decaying matter.
And already this week we're seeing 100,000 times the normal levels of methane, acceptable levels of methane, 100,000 times higher levels of methane, And it could ignite.
It has all sorts of possibilities.
So we'll revisit that in the first hour and then coming up for the main guest tomorrow night, we'll be talking about, from an insider's point of view, a guy who admits to lying to launch pharmaceuticals and what he knew about the pharmaceutical industry lies coming up tomorrow night on Coast to Coast.
Alright, your first guest, be sure and ask him what happens if all of that methane is for some reason triggered and released all at once.
It's coming and he said if it does, all it takes is one lightning strike and you could have a massive fireball over Florida.
Yes, well there's a great deal of methane, of course, being released in the ongoing spill as well.
Right, you've got all that going at the same time.
Okay my friend, that's tomorrow night.
Good to hear from Doug.
Good to hear you too, buddy.
Take care and see you tomorrow evening and we will be back with Larry Schweiger in a moment.
Once again, Larry Schweiger and again, folks, you're listening to the Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation.
Larry, welcome back.
Before we continue, you know, I have the opportunity to get little messages that are typed to me by the audience on a computer here as the show goes on.
And I'm not going to read them on the air because I can't.
I mean, not all of them, but some of them are just so poisonous.
Anything that, you know, from the right, I guess, it seems that once they hear global warming or anything attached to it or anything like it, or even the name Al Gore, boom!
And they're so angry.
What's this all about anyway?
Well, I'm sure there's a lot of reasons for that kind of behavior.
But, you know, the challenge we have in America is that America is addicted to fossil fuels and in particular addicted to oil.
And any time you challenge someone to give up an addiction, there's a real squirming.
There's a real difficult, you know, process that some people go through and change.
And so, you know, I think there's, you know, there are going to be folks that will, that will have troubles with anything that would somehow prompt them to make some different life choices.
Well, actually, the whole world's addicted to oil.
And China is just the latest to join the club.
We're all addicted to oil.
And that's because we haven't done anything else yet to speak of.
I mean, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage.
Anything else, whatever other kind of fuel you're talking about, there's some dabbling out there.
But mainly, the world is still using oil.
So it's not just the U.S., it's everybody.
And you're right.
When you ask them to possibly change something, people hate change, I guess, don't they?
They do.
And I think as our society gets older, I think it's harder for us to change.
And so, you know, you find among young people an understanding that we need to move to a new energy source, that we need to develop electric cars and move more to mass transportation systems that are driven by electric and that sort of thing.
And it's the older, particularly the older generation that really has great difficulty in seeing the needed changes.
That explodes his anger.
Okay, all right.
Larry, let's go back to the Gulf for a second.
So, yes, you've had a presence down there for a long time.
Of course you would.
It's ecologically very delicate, very important, very important area.
This last time you went down and you looked at the spill and you looked at the figures and what's going on currently, I mean, obviously you came away with impressions and I'd like to hear those.
Well, I think the thing for most, you know, that would be beneficial for most people is to understand that this is America's largest seafood The Gulf of Mexico produces about half of our shrimp and 35% of our blue crabs and 40% of our oysters and 25% of our fin fish.
So we're really talking about the health and viability of our food supply, particularly our seafood supply.
And when you spend time with the people down there who have worked for literally generations to produce A consistent flow of fish and shellfish for our consumption and realize that these people, it's not just a job, but it's their way of life, it's their tradition, it is so much a part of their fabric of existence.
It's very touching because many of these people have suffered through the terrible consequences of Hurricane Katrina and Rita and several other storms that have rolled through there in recent years.
But now they're facing the possibility of losing their livelihood for, you know, for years to come.
And they know it.
And, you know, it's just very sad to watch and to see and to experience.
And particularly when you walk into the marshes and you see oil birds and endangered sea turtles having trouble Because they've been oiled and because their food supply is oiled.
It's very difficult to even describe, but we were out one day on the water and the oil was so thick that you couldn't see into the water at all.
It was black as night.
And as far as we could see, the oil was laying on the surface.
It was, for whatever reason, it was raw, untreated oil.
That had escaped the airplanes and escaped the treatment that BP has been doing with dispersants.
But at any rate, it was a very, very eerie feeling because the oil dampened on the waves and there were obviously no birds in sight because the oil either captured them or drove them away.
And no fish moving around.
And normally you can see deep into the water.
You couldn't see even a half inch into the water.
Very strange feeling to be out there on a boat and sitting in the middle of this.
The odors are very strong as well.
I've heard that.
I've heard that people even in the area are getting dizzy and being affected but actually being out on it.
Did you experience it?
So you were out in a In a boat.
Did you experience any of that?
Did you begin to get lightheaded or feel any effect at all?
We actually had taken carbon filters with us.
You know, the respirators that have carbon canisters with them.
And when the oil became heavy, I put one on and that helped a little bit.
But, you know, I came back after one trip where there was a lot of dispersants in the water.
My shirt had been exposed to the dispersants, and when I got back, I realized that the dispersants were so toxic and so powerful that they actually took the color out of my shirt.
Where my sleeves were rolled up, the shirt was protected, but the rest of the shirt actually lost its color.
It tells you how powerful these chemicals are when you have that type of an exposure and it does that kind of damage to the shirt.
Let me ask you about those dispersants.
I'm not a scientist.
On the one hand, I want to say it seems at some level like the dispersants are helping But on another level, is it going to, in the end, make it more difficult to somehow clean this up, if that's even possible?
And are they dangerous?
What do you know?
Well, I think the use of dispersants is very controversial, and it should be.
The chemical dispersant that they're using, that BPU is using, is called Corexit.
And it's a chemical that is designed to actually interfere with the relationship between water and oil.
It allows oil to enter the water in a way that it normally would not.
And so the oil is theoretically broken up, but actually it's dispersed into the water.
That's why they call it a dispersant.
It's in the water column rather than on the surface.
And it's a, you know, a known toxic chemical.
In fact, it's actually more toxic than the oil itself.
And the other thing that dispersants do that's problematic is, you know, when they put booms up to protect marshes, dispersants, because they take oil down into the water column, allow the oil to bypass the booms.
So if oil is on the surface, it can be captured in a boom and retrieved.
If it's mixed with dispersants, then that oil will go straight underneath the booms.
And so the idea of protecting these coastlines with booms is really missing the point that you've already dispersed the oil so that it's going to go under the boom.
Larry, let me understand this, corrects it.
You say it allows the oil somehow to go under the booms.
Does that mean that it Dilutes it in a way that allows it to become subsurface?
Or does it cause it to form into clumps?
In other words, I'm trying to understand if it's more diluted and then able to, because of the atomic weight or whatever, be able to then be subsea?
Or what exactly corrects it?
I know there are a lot of secrets about this, so you might not know the answer.
I'm certainly not sure I know the answer.
Is that what it does, or how does it affect the oil, really?
Well, the spill that I was describing earlier, where all this raw oil was sitting on the surface, we returned to that site the next morning, and in the meantime, airplanes had flown over and sprayed this large oil slick with Corexit.
And what we found was that the oil was down in the water column.
You could see it down deep in the water.
And in fact, we sent a deep diving camera down.
We had a team of scientists out with us and they went down 250 feet and could see the oil in water.
It almost looks like a, I hate to use the comparison because it sounds like food, but if you look at oil and vinegar with the oil shaken up and you see little beads of oil floating in the vinegar, that's what you see when you look down into the water after Corexit has been applied.
And what we see today at the spill site is, I don't know if you've noticed, but when you see all the oil coming out of the wellhead, you also notice that a white stream of chemicals are being injected into that stream of oil.
And that's the correxit.
And that's the correxit.
So they're putting this dispersant down one mile underwater, and that's never been done before.
You know, if you look at the At the authorization on Corexit, it was authorized to be used on the surface, not to be used one mile down.
And so we don't know really anything about what happens when that oil is dispersed down at that depth, you know, where it goes.
But the idea that BP is suggesting that none of the oil is below the surface is really ludicrous because they, in fact, are putting chemicals to keep it dispersed and to cause it to never make it to the surface.
And we also have large amounts of methane.
You mentioned earlier, the methane and there's tremendous amounts of methane being released from this well.
And that also intermix with oil and probably alters its solubility in water as well.
So there are a number of chemical processes going on all at the same time.
And, and they're poorly understood.
But we do know There's a lot more oil going into the sea, and much of it never makes it to the surface, or if it does, is re-entrained back into the water column through the use of aerial sprays.
Larry, is that also what causes the clumping?
Because on most of the beaches, it seems to be coming ashore in bald clumps or flat sort of pancake clumps.
Does CREXIT cause that?
That's actually left over from the oil spill.
If you look at the constituents in the oil itself, you'll find that there are a lot of volatile elements of oil when they go into the air.
And then there's these sort of mid-range compounds, and they are altered by the Corexit.
And then you have the heavier parts of the oil, and that's the asphalt-like material that ultimately works its way to shore.
And so the clumps that we're seeing are really the bottom end of the crude oil itself.
So you're You know, there's a certain amount of the oil that ends up looking like that, and that oil tends to work its way towards the coastlines.
And it's really nasty stuff.
You know, it's sticky.
It's going to be there for a long time.
And that's what we saw in Alaska.
I've been to the Prince William Sound, and even after 20 years, after the Exxon Valdez spill, That heavy oil is still under the sand and still found in about half of the samples that have been taken by the scientists last summer.
Yes, I've heard that, that every time they talk about it, they talk about Exxon Valdez, that is to say, they talk about the fact that 20 years later, dig down a little bit, there's the oil, despite all those cleanup efforts.
Is there any chance, Larry, that they're going to be able to in some way get this cleaned up so that you're not left with the same kind of legacy?
And I know I'm asking a silly question as the Exxon Valdez spill.
Any chance at all that because of the massive effort going on or is it simply Is this to the point where it's beyond, so far beyond man's control that what's going to happen is going to happen and there's not a lot we can do?
Well, I think that there's, first of all, there's a massive amount of oil that's been put into the Gulf.
You know, we have probably more than 10 times as much oil spilt out of the Exxon Valdez or more today.
Really done at this time.
And then secondly, I think the storms that are turning in the Gulf, depending on which way they go, if they go to the west of the Mississippi River, they could drag large quantities of this surface oil that we're just talking about, an oil that's in the water column, into the marshes.
And if that happens, We're going to see a lot of damage and it's the kind of damage that will take a long time, if ever, to recover because once these marshes are poisoned by oil and tars, they tend to completely collapse and disappear because the living organisms, the plant material, the activity in the marshes is what keeps the marshes from sinking out of sight.
So, in some ways, no matter how this goes, it's already too late.
I think it's certainly too late to avoid damage.
And how much damage, I think, is dependent on storms and also will be dependent on how much we put on the ground in terms of response.
That's been a real struggle because the folks at BP did not have a plan, did not have a well organized response effort in place before the spill.
Alright, another half hour shot.
Hold on, we'll take a break here at the top of the hour.
There is so very much to talk about.
Larry Schweiger is my guest, Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation from Manila, Philippines.
I'm Art Bell.
Here I am.
Well, all that anger out there.
A lot of people simply determined to stick their heads into the oily sand.
I've got a guest.
He's the Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation, and his name is Larry Schweiger.
We're going to continue with this and find out as much as we can.
Certainly, this is a man who has looked deeply into the problem.
Nobody knows all the answers.
In fact, there's a lot going on.
A lot of rumors and so forth, as always, on the Internet.
We'll touch on a few of those and ask Larry about them.
He may not know the answers.
I don't think any of us knows, would know all the answers, but we'll take a stab at it anyway.
For example, I'm getting a lot of messages asking about fractures under the sea.
There's a lot of internet babble going on about fractures under the sea.
Certainly I hope that's not true.
But that's one of the big rumors making the rounds right now.
This is without a doubt the The worst United States accident of its sort by many, many magnitudes as oil continues to gush into the Gulf.
Will there be dead areas in the Gulf?
Are there already dead areas in the Gulf?
I imagine scientists are probing that issue and many others.
We'll be right back.
All right, once again, Larry Schweiger.
Welcome back, Larry.
Thank you.
You know, it's hard to know where to go, but let me ask you about some of the things running around the Internet right now.
A lot of people are blogging about fractures.
This is beyond, you know, the well itself, the wellhead itself.
Fractures in the floor of the gulf that are spewing oil.
Have you heard anything about that?
Is there anything to it?
Well, there's always a certain amount of natural oil that seeps into not just the Gulf, but into other locations around the world.
There are some natural seeps.
The other thing I would point out is the place where this well was drilled in the deeper waters, what we have is quite a number of methane formations.
The methane that leaks from the subsurface makes its way to the to the water itself.
And because it's under such pressure, and it's also cold temperatures, the methane freezes and forms a crystalline structure that they call the hydrates.
And there are vast hydrates under the ocean scattered throughout the world.
And, and in fact, they, they, they become probably the largest store of carbon under the sea.
And so when they're drilling through these, these hydrates, they're really running You know, headlong right into, you know, large quantities of methane, both at the well site as well as adjacent to it in the various methane formations.
And I guess the hydrides are what jammed up the effort, the initial effort, for Top Gel and all the rest of it, right?
Yeah, that's right.
And that's part of the challenge is because they're at such incredible pressures And low temperatures, it has a tendency to freeze up the methane.
It's at a pressure temperature range that the methane turns into crystalline.
People heard about the ice and they think about water turning to ice, but this is actually the methane.
And of course, it was the methane that caused the explosion in the first place.
So, we're adding a lot of methane to the water column as well as oil.
And the methane helps to suck the oxygen out of the water.
And when you talk about dead zones, you're really talking about the biological oxygen demand of oil dispersed into the water and also the so-called BOD of the methane as it consumes oxygen.
And the warmer the waters get, the more biological activity there is working on the more the bugs in the ocean begin to work on the oil.
the more they suck the oxygen out of the water and therefore cause
and then creates the potential of having enormous dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
Oh God.
All right.
Our federal government, the president's kind of between a rock and a
hard place.
You know, on the one hand, I mean, this becomes a little political, but if the president touches this disaster, then, as the talking heads suggest, he owns it.
After a while, he owns it.
By now, he sort of owns it politically, and the President's approval numbers are tumbling right now as a result of owning this, but I think he had no choice as President of the United States.
How is the federal government doing now in terms of their role in trying to help the impact, the cleanup, working with BP, all the rest of it?
Well, you know, there's this historic relationship between the Coast Guard and the oil companies.
And frankly, folks have been concerned about that.
You know, the Coast Guard started off by calling BP its partner and sharing websites and, you know, sharing a command center with BP and all that sort of thing.
And so there was a relationship there that I should say built up over many years.
It was entirely too cozy and not at arm's length.
The same thing is true with the Minerals Management Service.
There was the same sort of cozy relationship.
And, you know, they were, in fact, there's a lot of revolving door people who formerly worked for the oil industry working for the government and so forth.
And, you know, I don't think that was healthy.
It was not, you know, the result of this administration that was more A result of many years of relationships that were built up.
And as a result, we did not have, I don't think, in place an aggressive review of these permits before they're issued.
In fact, the plans that were submitted had included protection for walruses in the Gulf of Mexico.
Did you hire her at that?
That shows you how anemic and really pathetic the planning was and we saw that when we got down there.
It's a little bit like trying to organize a fire department after your house is on fire.
BP had a rig burn up and had all this oil spewing into the ocean and began to, you know, several weeks after the spill had been in full bloom, had begun to try to organize fishermen to, you know, to set up booms and to do other things.
And these folks were not trained in hazmat handling, they were not properly equipped, they were not certainly not trained to dispatch booms and the other things that they're required to do now.
And I think that's another example of the failures that occurred here.
But clearly, there were a lot of problems.
On the positive side, I think what the president did a few days ago in establishing this $20 billion open-ended fund, he did something that did not happen in the Exxon spill and something that was very, very important.
You know, after the Exxon spill, the fishermen, the communities that were harmed, had to go to court to fight Exxon.
To get some compensation, and they ended up getting a $5 billion settlement from a jury.
And by the time that worked its way all the way through to the Supreme Court, because Exxon appealed it with their many lawyers, they ended up getting about $0.07 to $0.12 on a dollar in a $500 million settlement.
Over 20% of the people who were harmed never got a dime before they died.
That was just as delayed and never really ended up being just because they didn't get what they deserved in terms of a settlement.
And so by the president establishing this $20 billion fund, I think he has protected the people in the Gulf from this kind of long and drawn out legal battle to try to get recovery.
And, you know, so I think that was a very, very important moment and we hope certainly that some of that money will also be made available to help restore the damaged wetlands.
I hope so.
In a way, we're lucky that it was BP that had this spill because they've got the financial muscle, I hope, without going belly up to get us through to the other end, whatever the other end of this is going to be.
They're a large company and they're really taking a lot of terrible hits and probably deservedly so for what we're hearing were the mistakes, misjudgments, things that went wrong with equipment, all the human error, all the rest of it.
They're probably taking all the deserved hits but it is pretty rough and it's a good thing it's BP because they They do have the money to do this, and that's about as much as I can say that's positive for BP right now, as much as I can muster up.
So, you're directly involved, I suppose, in efforts to help clean up, you know, the wildlife that are being impacted, all the oiled birds and all that.
Is this the end of Our seafood supply from the Gulf, or is that an overreach?
Is that too much to say?
I think it's an overreach.
First of all, I want to step back a bit.
We're involved in the search part of the search and rescue.
We've been dispatching groups of volunteers to identify where birds are showing up and where turtles are being oiled.
But BP actually has other groups under contract.
To get back to your question, the issue we have is that there are certain places where oil will have enormous impact on the fish and shellfish.
out of that part of it. To get back to your question, the issue we have is that there
are certain places where oil will have enormous impact on the fish and shellfish. Oysters,
for example, can magnify the concentration of oil by a factor of 1,000. So if you have
1 part per million oil in the water, oysters can magnify that to 1,000 parts per million.
So it will take a long time to get the oil concentrations down to the point where you
won't be able to smell or taste or have a negative effect on your food in certain areas
because of this biomagnification problem. But we expect that over time that that may
recover. We also would hope that...
That there are other places in the Gulf where there are, you know, shrimp and blue crabs and that sort of thing that haven't gotten oiled and those places certainly it's still acceptable and safe to eat the food and it's our hope that the federal government does a good job of monitoring and I think to date they seem to be Doing a good job of responding to oil movement and making sure that the public is not consuming contaminated fish.
Well, I guess fishing is now banned in what, about a third of the entire Gulf?
Yeah, it's a real sad story, you know, when you're down at these fishing marinas because, you know, this is one of the real hot spots for recreational fishermen as well as the commercial takes that I talked about earlier.
And in fact, we did a telephone call with Sportsman and had over 9,000 hunters and anglers on the phone with us because they wanted to find out what was happening to the places where they fish and where they hunt.
And they're very concerned because these are some really great places for those who enjoy fishing and hunting.
There's been obviously a lot of comparison between the BP disaster and Exxon Valdez.
In orders of magnitude, what do we know right now?
How much worse is this than Exxon Valdez?
Well, it depends on the numbers that you use, but certainly we're at least 10 times worse today and maybe much more Because of the sheer volume of oil spilling.
But it's not a straight line relationship.
The oil that was dumped from the Exxon Valdez was a sour crude.
This is a sweet crude.
The water temperatures in the Prince William Sound were lower.
And it was a one-time event.
You know, when the Exxon Valdez struck the Bly Reef, it dumped its load fairly quickly.
Where, you know, here we have this day in and day out pouring of large quantities of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
So, there are other factors that are at play here.
And it's also being spewed at one mile down as opposed to being spilled on the surface.
So, you know, there are differences.
But this spill is so much greater than that, it's hard to even make the comparison.
If you take a middle figure in terms of the estimates of how much oil is going into the Gulf, what do you think it is right now?
now? Do you have a sort of a best guess? Well I sort of looked to the to the
experts on the numbers and we've been upset because from the almost from the
beginning because BP has been saying it doesn't matter when in fact it does
matter you know It has to do with their ability to deal with the total oil spill, but it also has to do with their liabilities.
For every gallon of oil that's put into the Gulf, they are Liable under the Clean Water Act For the pollution that they're causing and I say it doesn't matter Larry.
What do they mean?
Well?
Early on they kept saying it doesn't matter.
We're just trying to get it shut off, and you know I'm trying to you know really discourage people from speculating on how much oil and we've seen a number of estimates and You know I I think we're still waiting for the official You know, firm numbers from the federal government.
And I think we ought to demand that the federal government put a hard number on this because, in fact, that will ultimately determine how much they're reliable for in terms of the Clean Water Act penalties.
And it also matters a great deal because when we start trying to figure out how much oil
is still out there and what it may do to Florida, what it may do to the Gulf Stream, and what
it may do to others, it matters greatly, I think.
Well, I've heard estimates.
I mean, BP at first said, what, a thousand barrels a day or something of that nature, I believe, and then began hearing 5,000, 10,000, 20, 30, 40, 50,000, some up to 100,000 barrels a day.
So, you know, it is important, not just in terms of their liability, but in terms of understanding the magnitude of what we're facing.
Exactly.
And that's been part of the game all along, is to hide the ball with dispersants and to try to, you know, undersize the total scale of the spill in a way that really misses the mark.
And we've seen it.
CNN, for example, has clips of various people making spill estimates, and it's really quite humorous when you see them all together strung in, you know, In a continuous set of projections, it's really laughable.
And that's why I hate to get into the game until the scientists who were doing the assessments actually put a firm number on it.
But you're absolutely right.
The numbers have ranged from being completely undersized to perhaps being close to the mark with 100,000 a day.
Now, just working with round numbers, 100,000 barrels of oil, a lot of Americans sort of don't relate to that, but they do relate to gallons.
Everybody knows what a gallon of gas is.
So, if you had 100,000 barrels of oil, how many millions of gallons would that be?
Well, for every barrel of oil, you're talking about 42 gallons of oil.
Just do the math and you get this astronomical number of gallons of oil that are being spewn into the Gulf each and every day.
So that could be, well who knows, but 20, 30, 40 million gallons of oil?
Is that right?
It's hard to say and I don't want to call a number.
You know, I think clearly, you know, we're seeing extraordinarily high numbers of oil, gallons of oil flowing into the Gulf.
And, you know, we should also remember that this oil was destined to be burnt.
And if it were, it would be carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere.
It would be invisible, but it nonetheless would be Put into the sky.
All right.
Larry, I'm sorry.
We're at another break.
Stay right there and we'll be right back from Manila, Philippines, other side of the world.
I'm Art Bell.
Good morning from the other side of the world.
How are you?
My guest is the Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation, Larry Schwager.
We're talking about, of course, the oil spill and I'm going to venture out on a limb here a little bit.
And I've been wondering about this for a long time and people seem afraid to talk about it, but I want to ask the question anyway.
And I'll give Larry a moment to think about it.
BP has made some statements, made them early on, that one final thing that they might do is implode the well.
Implode the well.
Now, it seems to me if they were going to do that, it would have been best done some long time ago before we had so much oil go into the Gulf.
But...
Is it possible?
That's one question I have.
And how do you implode a well?
Well, it's my understanding that the Soviets, many years ago, used small nuclear devices to implode two or three wells that had the same sort of problem.
Now, I'm not necessarily recommending the use of a nuclear weapon there.
However, I'm not excluding it either.
And it may be possible that it could be done with conventional explosives as well.
So I do wonder why.
They have not attempted it.
There may be a technical reason and a risk that I don't properly understand, but certainly a nuclear weapon, a small nuclear weapon, or a large amount of conventional explosives would have a chance of collapsing.
There is, after all, a couple thousand feet or better of rock.
between where the oil is coming from and its exit point.
So if it would be possible to turn that into essentially glass, it's a metaphor really, and stop the oil, then I would first wonder why it wasn't done some time ago and whether it is possible that it would be done now.
And another question I have, Larry, and I know you're listening, is that These relief wells that are being drilled, how much of a chance is there that these relief wells really are going to cure the problem?
That they're going to be able to cement it up, do whatever they have to do once they get to the proper depth sometime in August?
That's still a long ways away.
So, a couple of questions.
One involving the use of explosives to seal the well instead of allowing this to continue.
What the risks are versus the possible benefit.
And, you know, the moment you say the word nuclear, everybody cringes, and include me in that group.
However, if it would stop The ongoing disaster, then why not?
And I have heard a couple of sort of quiet voices in the night advocating such a thing.
I would just like to understand.
I'm sure at high levels it has been discussed, not publicly for the most part, but discussed.
If we could stop it, would that not be a proper and peaceful use of nuclear energy?
So there you are.
I want to ask the question.
Larry will be back along with myself in a moment.
Once again, Larry Schweiger.
Larry, welcome back.
I guess people are just really hesitant to talk about this sort of thing, but I do understand that it's been done, that wells can be imploded.
They can be sealed in that way with explosives, nuclear or otherwise, and do you know if there have been high-level talks about this?
I mean, certainly there have been.
Are you privy to what the risks are of doing something like that to stop the flow?
Well, you know, the question of high-level discussions, the Energy Department made it clear that they are not at all considering the idea of a nuclear device.
Steve Chu, who happens to be the head of the department, has been asked about that, and Larry, if you don't mind, is that a political or a scientific decision?
I think it starts with a scientific decision.
You know, the idea of, first of all, the Russians do things a little bit more On the edge.
Then we have, you know, they've disposed old nuclear subs under the ocean.
They've thrown canisters into the deep sea.
You know, things that we would never even consider.
And someday we'll come back to frankly haunt the people who live nearby.
And, you know, and I think we learned with Chernobyl that they, you know, they were using technology that had much higher risk than anything we would ever do.
So I wouldn't compare what Russians do with what we should do.
The other thing that I would point out is that it would be a violation of international treaties to do such a thing.
And beyond that, though, you know, the idea of setting off a nuclear bomb in the clathrates because of all this methane that is under the sea, I think would be another very, very dangerous thing.
So, you know, that is an option that's clearly off the table from the Energy Department and from the others involved.
I think the effort to intercept this well with secondary wells is the greatest hope that we have.
And so we can, you know, expect in the next several weeks, maybe two months to get to the point where they can do a bottom kill on this well.
And, you know, The chances of that working are not great, but they're certainly a lot better than what we've seen to date.
Okay, well that's exactly how you say not great.
The chances of the relief wells not working.
Not great, really?
I thought it was almost a done deal that when they got down there with relief wells, they could stop it.
And you're saying not good?
Chances not good?
Well, I would say that there's a certain amount of of chance in terms of hitting the the right spot in terms of, you know, getting there on the first try, you know, you know, every time they try, they're going to get, you know, get a better shot at it.
But you know, the, the idea that you're going to drill one well and, and kill it on the first try, I, you know, I would say that the chances that are not great that the chances over the next Several weeks to months after that, that we might get something to work, I think, increase with additional steps.
But, you know, I would hate to have us all hang our hopes on a single effort and expect that it would stop.
All right, before we leave the idea of implosion completely, all right, so they're not going to use a nuclear device, even though the Russians did successfully do so in two or three cases, what about conventional explosives?
Same problem with methane?
Well, again, I think, you know, the idea of using explosives, it's really throwing a dice, you know.
You're basically doing something that is not easily controlled, and there's a risk-consequence equation that would have to come into play, and I just don't think that's a good approach.
The trick here, I think, is to find a conventional way to intercept the leaking oil and to, you know, eventually shut it off.
And to contain this well once and for all through perhaps one of the bottom kill methods that they're working on.
This well, apparently, just looking at the numbers, again, what BP originally said in terms of the amount of oil coming and the reality of how much oil is coming, also bears on the pressures involved.
In other words, obviously, to be having the kind of numbers at the top end of what people are talking about, 100,000 barrels, is an enormous amount of pressure.
And that may, I guess that's what fouled the top hill efforts.
There simply was too much pressure and too much ice, hydrates and so forth.
So there must be an incredible amount of pressure, much more than anybody thought or talked about coming from underground, pushing all this up.
And will that bear on the possible success or failure possibility of the relief wells, just the amount of pressure involved?
Well, first of all, coming back to the pressure point in the previous comment about the explosives, you know, one of the things about exploding a device of any sort down there is that, in fact, you may be creating more fractures and creating at some point an uncontrollable That's one of the criteria that has been considered in any strategy that they've looked at.
Even with a couple of thousand feet of rock?
Yeah, the rock structure there is such that, you know, it is contained at this moment, but, you know, clearly any disruption could in fact fracture rock and have oil leaking from those fractures.
So, you know, I think that's one of the reasons why we have to use great care down there and what's being done.
You know, the thing about all of this is that we're drilling at a depth that the U.S.
government doesn't even have a vessel that can get on there and independently inspect this well site.
You know, we have to depend on equipment that BP provides for us and And if it weren't for, for example, Congressman Markey, we would not even be seeing the spill itself.
Because BP was not allowing the public to see the wellhead, even though they had film footage of that from the very beginning.
So we, you know, we're really at a depth where humans can't go and we're We don't even have a vessel to get down to that level to see what's actually taking place down there.
Including our nuclear submarines?
Including our submarines.
We're down over a mile in the water and the U.S.
fleet does not have a device that can get down that far.
Okay.
There's a six-month moratorium now on drilling in the Gulf.
And certainly a court fight going on right now about it.
Do you support that moratorium or how do you feel about it?
I know it's really magnifying the disaster for the people who are in the industry and the jobs that are lost and all the rest of it.
So where do you stand on the moratorium?
Well, we supported the President's call for a moratorium until we could understand what we're doing here.
You know, there's been a lot of, you know, a lot of applications.
In fact, there are applications pending right now for wells almost twice the depth of the current well.
So it doesn't make a lot of sense to us to, you know, to go back to deepwater drilling until we understand what we did wrong here.
You know, it would be like a particular aircraft having a mechanical that causes it to crash and then, you know, allow other planes to take off without knowing what caused the first plane to crash.
I mean, we, you know, we've suspended operations in the past in other areas and it's a prudent thing to do.
You know, when a brakes fail on a car and a particular model shows a pattern of brake failure, you know, you You pull the plug and you take a step back and figure out what's going on.
And I think that's what the President is calling for, is a pause in the drilling.
And I should also point out that part of the settlement with BP was to, in fact, pay the salaries of those who were displaced temporarily while this assessment was being completed.
So the idea of us going back with additional drilling rigs and potentially repeating this mistake in other places, It's a high risk, and we know now the consequences are staggering.
For a long time, the oil industry was basically saying that there was no risk of this deep water.
In fact, they were spending millions of dollars on television with these ads that say, the deeper you look, the better we look, and all that sort of thing.
You know, they were telling us that they could do all this without any damage to the ocean and that's just turning out to be, you know, a lot of PR and not a whole lot of science.
You've been quoted as calling the current energy investments we have as sub-prime.
What do you mean by sub-prime with regard to our energy investments?
Well, if you look at the history of oil development, for example, it started in my home state of Pennsylvania many, many years ago with Drake's Well.
And we have progressed over the years from a land-based energy system to a, you know, for a long time, the oil was being drilled in the Gulf of Mexico coastline.
And that's why we lost so many of the wetlands down there.
And then we moved to nearshore and now we're moving to offshore.
We're going after oil in places where it's very dangerous.
We're pursuing energy in ways that create greater and greater environmental consequence.
And we're doing that because the easy, cheap oil is gone.
And we're now chasing oil to the ends of the earth.
You know, there's an effort to go into the Chuck Chi and Burford Seas in the North Sea.
And again, we'll be drilling in deep water in, you know, really high risk cold water systems.
And, you know, at some point, you have to ask the question, you know, should we not be pursuing another energy pathway?
And I believe that the time is now for creating a new energy economy.
We're also sending a billion dollars every day to buy oil out of the Middle East.
And we're draining our economy while we're also funding our enemies.
And none of that makes any sense at all.
And we could be creating literally millions of jobs for Americans by moving to a new energy system.
That's right.
You said the time is now.
The time was a long time ago.
We should have been working on serious alternative energy.
Long, long ago, Larry.
We didn't do that.
And, you know, it's interesting, but as I look at the day-to-day discussion about the disaster down there, I'm still not hearing about a really major move to alternative energy.
I'm still not hearing it.
Are you?
We are not moving to a new energy strategy because we have energy policies in Washington
that are built around this old energy economy.
There are 750 oil lobbyists trying to keep us from changing those policies.
There's a real all-out effort to keep us addicted to fossil fuels in Washington.
The old story about money speaks and politicians listen.
We will not break our addiction to foreign oil and to oil until our politicians break
the addiction to oil and fossil fuel political contributions.
So these two things are very deeply connected.
No, we don't do anything in America until it's an emergency.
But if we really wait until the oil is gone, or at least the easily captured oil is gone, well, wait a minute, we've already passed that.
Then there's going to be a very dark period for humanity.
I mean, if oil essentially is gone, and we haven't developed other means, we're going to pollute the world's oceans, I suppose.
And I guess we're going to keep on drilling, baby drilling, no matter what, because we have to have it.
But then at some point, it's going to be just too damn late.
And then I just have no idea what will happen.
The price of oil, of course, will be up through the roof.
Economies will be ruined.
Wars will begin.
You know, it's the worst case scenario, Larry.
Well, you know, it's interesting because we've been working very hard to help Americans even understand where their oil comes from and where Where these dependence connections lead us.
And, you know, I don't know how many times we need to say it, but, you know, America needs an oil change, and it needs it today.
I was chuckling because Jon Stewart did a segment on this, and he has eight presidents all saying the same thing, threading all the way back to Richard Nixon.
You know, each one of them makes these wild promises of getting us off oil, and none of them are going to be able to pull it off.
And the reason for that is that the oil industry turns loose its fleet of lobbyists, and they have more than one lobbyist for every member of Congress.
So they work hard at keeping us addicted and preventing the transformational legislation that we need to move away.
All right, Larry, hold it right there.
These segments just disappear like a coastline in Louisiana and several other states.
My God, it's running fast.
Larry Schweiger is my guest.
He's the Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation from Manila in the Philippines, other side of the world.
I'm Art Bell.
Good morning from the other side of the world.
It's a pretty rough topic we're on tonight.
Incidentally, a little breaking news, I'm getting word there's been a 7.1 earthquake somewhere near the Solomon Islands.
And we are getting a lot of earthquakes, folks.
And we're getting quite a few eruptions of volcanoes.
The tall volcano north of us here is in a severe warning stage.
So just all over the world we're getting all sorts of things that are happening that are not good.
Earthquakes, extensive flooding, and in the middle of this we're dealing with America's worst oil spill by a gigantic margin.
There was one other, by the way, even worse, called the Itoxic One.
And we'll get to that.
And that was also, I believe, in the Gulf.
And so there may be some lessons from it or not.
I don't know.
But something is going on.
with Mother Earth.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a geologist to know that something unusual is going on all around us right now.
A kind of a, if you'll excuse the phrase, a kind of a quickening in everything.
We'll get back to my guest Larry Schweiger, Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation, in a moment.
Welcome back, Larry.
Thank you.
You've written a book called Last Chance Preserving Life on Earth.
That's pretty dire sounding, all right?
The last chance.
Is it really the last chance?
And, you know, why'd you write the book and call it Last Chance?
Well, it's, you know, we're talking about an oil spill here in the Gulf, but, you know, there's this other spill going on, which is that we're adding, last year we put 19 billion additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
And the year before that, we did a similar amount.
And the year before that, we did a similar amount.
And this year, we're on pace to do a similar amount.
Actually, it increases each year.
We're headed towards 20 billion tons.
But the point is that we're adding all this heat trapping gas to our atmosphere.
And it takes quite a long time, hundreds of years, if not thousands, to purge the atmosphere of this additional carbon dioxide.
So we've been altering the The chemistry of our atmosphere in such a way that it is causing a very dramatic, if you look at it on a timescale, very dramatic increase in temperature and that has had profound impact on, profound impacts on important ecological systems and certainly based on the scientists' best estimates, you know, we're headed to lose 30 to
39% of the species on the planet over the next 40 years if we don't change our behavior.
It sounds dire, it sounds outrageous, but in fact it is mainstream science and it's in the mid-range of Okay, you write about natural feedbacks in your book.
Can you explain what these are and why we ought to be concerned with them?
In your book you talk about a recent trip you made, I guess, to Greenland.
And if I remember correctly, Iceland is green and Greenland is ice, right?
So what did you see there?
Well, you know, first of all, starting with the Greenland trip, you know, we're seeing a rapid increase in ice melting in Greenland.
And it's an area that's about two miles thick in ice.
You know, so if you go to the upper surface, you know, 80 plus percent of Greenland is solid ice.
And that ice is melting at a significant pace.
In fact, Greenland itself has added Now two and onward to three new Nile rivers to the ocean.
So the equivalent of flow from the Nile River is going in, you know, coming in from Greenland.
So, as I describe in my book, what happens in Greenland will not stay in Greenland.
It will affect, you know, island nations.
It will affect mega deltas like the coastal Louisiana.
It will affect, you know, if you increase the sea level by, you know, One meter, you're going to displace about 100 million people on the planet.
100 million people?
Yeah.
So, you know, we're really talking about and I should also say that our military has cautioned and through several reports warning us that this type of climate change will in fact destabilize the world and will cause a lot more strife and difficulty
as people are pushed out of their their homelands.
Well, of course.
It also could be the precursor to a war.
I mean, wars are fought when people begin to get hungry, when people begin to get displaced and don't have land.
Wars have been fought over water and future wars certainly will be.
All kinds of things will begin to happen.
Well, no, correct that.
They're already happening.
These things are already occurring.
We're in the middle of it right now and one has to wonder, Where it becomes too late to turn back, does it?
You know, a lot of scientists have talked about that, that there could be a kind of a trigger point where the melting produces more melting, which produces more melting, more sunlight absorption, and so forth and so on.
And there could be a trigger point where there's no going back.
Do you subscribe to that?
I would subscribe to the notion that When you have these patterns that we're seeing, for example, we're melting out the Arctic ice and scientists are now predicting that within a few years that we will have a complete melt out of the Arctic in late summer season, so-called the summer nadir.
And if that happens, you know, we've taken a reflector the size of continental United States minus Arizona and The surface would bounce light back into space from the reflection on ice.
And we've turned it into an energy-absorbing sea, where about 80% or 90% of the total energy coming in is absorbed by the water.
And so you've taken a giant reflector and turned it into an absorber.
And so that's what I mean by natural feedbacks.
And those feedbacks then start to spill over, and we're seeing that already.
Spill over to the nearby countryside where they warm up the tundra, which has enormous quantities of carbon, both in terms of the ability to produce carbon dioxide and also methane.
And we're seeing that start to thaw out and warm up and decompose and give off its own carbon dioxide and its own methane.
And we're also seeing a boreal forest.
That used to get so cold in the wintertime that it froze out insects.
They're now not freezing out the insects, and we're seeing explosions of insect populations, particularly bark beetles, and they are killing the boreal forest, which add further to the carbon equation.
So, humans are the primary source of the carbon problem, but they are, by our actions, we're leading to these feedbacks.
And at some point, you cross a threshold where The feedbacks are so severe that they will, in fact, cause grave consequences to the planet.
Runaway?
I would describe it as moving from one state to another.
You know, we have, as a planet, we have lived, you know, mammals and particularly humans have lived in a certain temperature range and we're going to a different planet.
In fact, Some scientists are struggling with a new name for our planet because it's not going to be the same climatic system that we all enjoy as kids.
And I find that to be rather terrifying because I have three grandchildren and the idea that we're altering their future, making it more severe, making it much hotter and disrupting These vast ecosystems that are important for the stability of the planet, it's just beyond description.
Okay, let's get down to it.
I believe that there are natural cycles.
There are natural cycles.
I mean, we all know it.
You can look through the geology, the ice cores, all the rest of it.
They all tell a story of natural cycles.
Warmer, cooler, warmer, cooler.
So, that's an established scientific fact.
Now, the big question, of course, is how much man's hand is contributing to whatever natural cycle we're in the middle of.
If we're in the middle of a warming cycle right now, how much effect man's hand and what we do is adding to this, how much we should ascribe to natural change and how much we should ascribe to what we're doing?
That's a great question because if you look at those cycles that you described, at the bottom end of the cycle when you had a A large glacial sheet, particularly on the northern portion of the planet, we had about 181 parts per million or 180 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, roughly at the bottom end.
And at the upper end, we had about 281 parts per million of carbon dioxide.
And so it fluctuated between 180 and 280.
We're actually much higher than that.
the historic levels prior to the Industrial Revolution were basically 280 parts per million.
Today we've added 100 parts per million to the atmosphere of carbon dioxide.
So we're basically at 391 parts per million.
We're actually much higher than that.
And we have not seen those levels probably looking back for about a million years.
We're adding about two parts per million per year right now.
So we're increasing the pace at which that occurred.
When I first started in this field in the early 70s, we're adding about 0.7 parts per million.
So we're now about 2.1 to 2.4 parts per million per year.
So we're adding three times as much carbon to the atmosphere.
And that's because China and so many other countries and the U.S.
has added so much more.
But we're clearly in a breathtaking race to overload the system with carbon dioxide.
And that's why thousands of scientists now, 2,000 scientists on four different occasions over the last 15 years, have issued these urgent warnings and have told us to move quickly to solve this problem.
Put our fingers in our ears and start singing la la la la la and don't hear.
Okay, so looking back a million years, Larry, you're saying that in cycles over the last million years, it was between 180 parts per million, 281 parts per million at the worst point, and now we're more than 100 above that.
Is that accurate?
Yeah, we actually have good ice records going back 800,000 years that show the pattern that I just described, and the scientists have We have estimated that we have not seen the levels that we're currently seeing for probably about a million years.
But, you know, clearly we know in the last 800,000 years from the ice record, we know that we've not been anywhere near this.
And it's been, you know, we're about 100 parts per million above what we've previously seen.
And, you know, we also know that the, you know, the Earth in the ancient time was actually much warmer than it is today.
But we also know that the Earth was very different.
Inhabited by cold-blooded animals and had a lot of ferns and other, you know, vegetative species that handle low light conditions.
And, you know, as you heat up the earth, you put more moisture in the sky and you lower the amount of, over time, you will lower the amount of sunlight entering the system.
And that ultimately will be the stabilizer.
Well, if you go back to the time you just talked about, when the levels were that high, if humans had been on the earth, how would they have fared?
Well, you know, I'm not sure about you, but I'm not a big fan of eating ferns and that sort of thing.
I prefer other crops.
And other food sources.
In ancient times, the number of plant species were limited because the amount of light available was greatly diminished.
Today we have plant species that can tolerate and, in fact, thrive in different climatic conditions.
So, I think the important thing is that we're moving out of the Out of the paradigm that has made all that we know possible.
And we're moving into an unknown future paradigm of warmer Earth and much more robust storm activities.
And certainly we're going to be going into a period where we continue to melt ice from the mountaintops and from places like Greenland and Antarctica.
And where we lose the floating ice that we once had in the Arctic region.
So, you know, these are fundamental changes to the planet.
Very fundamental, yeah.
If you look at pictures of the Arctic from, I don't know, 40 years ago and look at them now, it's like 40% or better of the ice is gone.
It's really shocking.
People don't want to see that sort of thing.
Anyway, let's go ahead and tackle a really tough one just before the big Copenhagen conference.
We all know there was a break-in to the data center at the University of East Anglia releasing, what, a thousand emails or something from various climate scientists, 3,000 other climate-related documents.
The well-timed break-in, carefully parsed communications documents, and well-crafted attack messages presented a picture of climate change was a big scientific hoax.
Was this a well-planned and executed cyber attack?
Could it be part of a larger effort to avoid addressing an international climate treaty?
Did it in fact disrupt the climate conference as apparently intended?
Did it disrupt it?
Well, that's a really good question.
We did not end up with the kind of outcome we would have hoped for at Copenhagen.
How much of a factor it was is still to be fully understood, but there's no question that someone was spending some serious money to create a campaign to confuse particularly the American public about climate change on the eve of this major international conference.
And the interesting thing that since that time, you know, there have been now several investigations of the science itself, you know, When Watergate occurred, we focused on who did the break-in.
On Climategate, we focused on the scientists and not on who did the break-in.
Have those since been vindicated?
And they have been.
Both from a British panel of scientists as well as a panel of independent scientists who looked at Dr. Michael Mann's work at Penn State University.
And these studies have been vindicated.
The scientists have been cleared of scientific wrongdoing and the science remains intact.
And sadly, that story has not been told the way it needs to be.
Every time we discover something in science, particularly environmental science, The scientist involved becomes the target of, you know, huge pressure.
When Rachel Carson proved that DDT was damaging bird reproduction, they attacked Rachel Carson and she responded by asking who speaks and why.
But nonetheless, she became a victim of their attacks.
When Dr. Herbert Needleman proved lead was interfering with children's mental development, he was attacked.
They filed an academic complaint against him.
He was later proven to be right.
But nonetheless, Herb had to spend a great deal of his own money defending himself before an academic attack from those who were being affected.
Have we caught the people who broke in?
No, in fact, there's not been a lot said about them.
And, you know, the question is, who paid for all this?
This was not some high school hacker that did this.
This was a well-organized cyber attack, broke into the email system and into the computers, and then moved the records over to a Russian computer.
So that these records could not be, you know, we could not trace who actually did it.
And then they were carefully packaged and worded in such a way that people got little snippets that confused them.
Mm-hmm.
Gee, I wonder who could have been behind that, Larry.
Gosh.
All right.
We're at another break point, and I appreciate your patience.
I wish we could just go and go.
From Manila in the Philippines, all these islands, good morning, everybody.
I'm Art Bell, and we will be right back.
It is.
Good morning from the other side of the world, the island nation of the Philippines.
I am Art Bell.
My guest is the Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation.
His name is Larry Schweiger and it's an honor to have him here this morning.
We're talking about all sort of, I guess, environmental issues and that includes global warming and I know that's where a lot of you Sort of go around the corner and get very angry and I see that reflected in the messages that come to me, some of them anyway, and it's amazing to me, it's astounding to me
And I guess it's just because of, you know, the possible change that we all face.
I mean, it is going to be disruptive.
We're going to have to change the way we do things.
We're going to have to explore new avenues of energy.
And I'm not suggesting the world come to a stop.
And we need oil between now and when we do it.
You know, you would think that the present political climate, such as it is, if it's not available for anything else, this disaster, you would think that a president like the one we have now could seize it as an opportunity To say, look, that's it.
There can be no more delay.
We have to begin changing our energy policies and changing them now and changing them quickly.
When we needed something quickly done before, we came up with the Manhattan Project.
It can be done.
But why aren't we doing it?
Why haven't we done it in the past?
Well, that's not worth asking.
That's the past.
Why aren't we doing it now?
Why isn't this president seizing the opportunity In the middle of this crisis to push and do what I know in his heart He knows has to be done and I haven't really heard a word yet about it or if I have that's all I've heard is words I Just I don't understand that if there was ever a political climate where it could be done It seems to me this would be it of course The climate does change doesn't it?
We'll be right back All right, back we are, and let me put that to you, if I might, Larry.
If ever there was an opportunity for a president to seize on a current situation and to actually begin to do what, you know, you and I have been talking about in terms of a change of direction for the country and the world, it seems like this would be it.
And I haven't heard a lot about that yet.
How do you feel about that?
Well, I think the president has done what the other presidents have said before, and that is the time for a new energy policy for this country.
He has called upon Congress to act.
In fact, next Tuesday, he is meeting with key Republicans and Democrats to try to see if they can't forge a way forward on an energy and climate policy.
You know, the really difficult thing that's going on in Washington right now, and I've been involved in lobbying on various environmental issues since the late 60s, and I've never seen it quite like this.
The Republicans have decided that they're going to try to block the passage of anything that is before the Senate, particularly, and shut down the legislative mechanism.
That's a very dangerous thing to do to our country because obviously we need to make decisions and we need to tackle problems.
And the other thing that's happened is that there's been a, and I say this as one who was a Republican committee man in my earlier days, but you know, the Republicans have historically had a strong tie to the environment.
You know, we've, we've seen it all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt, but today, There is this anti-environment thread that runs through many, many Republicans, and they're having a real struggle within the party.
There are a few Republicans that want to do the right thing, and they're being subjected to enormous pressure from the others not to step forward, not to stand up to tackle this problem.
So despite the fact that we've had our worst ecological disaster in the history of this country, they're being pressured not to do anything on the climate energy policy.
So, you know, it's a showdown that needs to happen.
And I think that it's time to confront this matter and have the American public see in daylight what's been going on behind closed doors.
and to understand that there are people who are so closely tied to the big oil that they
aren't willing to readjust the energy policies in this country.
Of course, but if our president has one thing, he has a pulpit.
That's what he has.
And I think the American people, whatever else they feel, all pretty much know in their
core that things have got to change and they've got to change quickly.
Wouldn't it be an opportunity for this president to use the rhetoric he's so comfortable with
to sit in front of the American people and say, look, now is the time.
There can't be any more delay.
Those who stand in the way have got to get out of the way or we're all... Be careful the words I use.
Yeah, we're all in trouble.
That's what you should be doing!
Yeah, and he, I think that he needs to, he has that opportunity and the moment is now and I suspect that we'll hear more from him because he's made some pretty serious international promises to cut carbon emissions by 17% by 2020.
And, you know, you can't do that if you don't, if you don't have a new energy policy.
We're currently living under The Bush-Cheney energy policy, and we can see that that's not working.
So, you know, clearly he has an opportunity to present a new direction, and I would challenge not just the President, but also the leaders of the U.S.
Senate to step forward.
The House has acted.
It has passed a bill to do the work that we need to do to get started, at least.
And it's now time for the Senate to act, and I hope that The Senators will see their moment and do the thing that's right for all America and for the world.
John, I hope so too.
You know, if not now, then when?
I mean, this President certainly has sympathies in this direction and the opportunity to go to the American people and above the heads of the Senators if necessary, and I think it is necessary.
I wonder if he is contemplating such a move.
Well, I think it's a possibility, and certainly he's made some early statements, but he's got a team of top scientists gather around him, and I think he needs to unleash his scientists to help educate the public, because the American public has been in the dark on these issues for so long, and because of the confusion that has occurred, deliberate confusion, as it turns out, A lot of people don't understand the dire consequences that we're about to experience if we don't change our ways.
So I think there's a need to continue to help the American public understand that this is not only a national security issue, because we are sending, after all, a billion dollars to the Middle East each day.
And that that money helps to, in some cases, helps to fund our enemies.
Larry, would you imagine that at some level, and I wouldn't even venture to suggest what level, our own military industrial complex was behind the break-in?
That's a great question.
It deserves a great answer.
Yeah, when you look at who is to benefit and who is to lose, clearly the fossil fuel purveyors are the beneficiaries of confusion.
And we know that they've spent a lot of money hiring bloggers and And have actually hired, you know, particularly older retired scientists to go out and trumpet their confusion efforts.
And that's been going on for a long time.
That's not something new.
So this would certainly fit into that pattern.
But I think the key thing here is that there was not a sufficient investigation of who did the break-in and why.
And so now we're left with just the damage and the confusion that has been created by this overall effort.
I'm over here very, very close to China.
China's probably about to become, if they haven't already, the biggest emitter surpassing the United States and if they haven't it'll be soon.
Are they doing enough in China to emit less carbon?
Well the interesting thing about that is that China is now number one and they've surpassed us in emissions and that story has been out there recently but the other thing that's going on that is not out there The Chinese are now buying up all the wind, solar, and new technologies, and they are going to become the driving economic engine behind the new generation of power in the world.
We are letting this industry slip away from us.
I don't get it.
I don't get it.
So many Americans could be put to work.
So many industries could come back to America, and we're going to let the Chinese lead the march?
It's quite stunning.
I mean, they're buying our best technologies.
You know, our universities developed this technology.
And because we have not passed a new energy policy, the companies that got started here in the U.S.
are being plucked off one by one by the Chinese, who have almost a trillion of our dollars over there.
So they're looking for ways to reinvest.
And so they're buying our companies and moving them lock, stock and barrel to China.
And the Chinese are going to be making our solar panels, our thin-film solar that we'll put on our windows.
They're building, you know, the wind turbines and, you know, developing all these other advanced efficiency technologies that will sweep across the system.
And the Chinese will be in the driver's seat.
You know, and that is, to my way of looking at it, a tragedy of huge consequence to us because we should be, we were the country that developed these technologies and we're now letting them slip through our hands because we've not made The right energy policy decision.
What happened to us, Larry?
What happened to us?
We were America.
We were the world's leader.
When a crisis comes along, we've always been the one to step in and do whatever had to be done.
And for some reason, Larry, something happened to America.
I don't know what, or maybe I do.
It's sad.
It's just so sad to me.
And here come the Chinese, building solar panels, building wind turbines, doing what we should be doing so that we have an economy, so that we have people working again and heading us in the right direction.
You know, every survey they do recently, increasingly large numbers of Americans are saying, we're going the wrong way.
And we are going the wrong way.
What's happened to us?
Well, that's a really great question.
I think it has to do with the fact that our political system has become so entangled with money.
It used to be that votes were important.
Now it's the money that's important.
I think we've had a hard time getting the kind of changes in Congress that we need.
I would lay this at the feet of Congress.
Because they have so much money to raise in order to get re-elected, to buy the TV ads and so forth, they have become so addicted to these major donations from people who have special interests.
And so, I think Congress has become a large collection of special interests and not necessarily watching out for America's America's interest.
So, to my mind, the political contributions and the influence that they purchase have really adversely affected our ability to make timely and appropriate decisions.
Is this a case where our democracy is doing us in?
Well, it's interesting because, you know, the big Corporations have figured out how to play the game, and they've played it very, very well.
And now we have a Supreme Court that just recently ruled that corporations are essentially people and are able to do what people do in terms of political contributions and in terms of free speech and all that.
So, you know, with corporations being granted free speech rights, it's hard for me to imagine that this is going to reverse anytime soon.
But, you know, America should be alarmed at how much corporate influence is really driving the decision making in this country.
And it goes, Eisenhower warned us about that, you know, warned repeatedly since that time that this corporate structure is having an adverse impact on our country.
And I think today we're seeing the fruit of that, of those investments over many, many years.
Well said.
So I guess, so corporations are now people and they have the right of free speech and so forth and so on.
I wonder if, along with that, corporations are responsible as are individual people for their deeds.
I guess so.
But without a sea change, And the way we're doing things and to allow China to march ahead and do what we should have been doing years and years ago is just plain sad.
Because it's going to be a shift in the power base of the world.
And we're just letting it happen.
It's so sad.
It is sad.
The power base has already shifted.
We may not have fully realized it, but the, you know, the Chinese, you know, we're looking behind us for the Chinese to catch up to us.
And when in fact, they're out in front of us.
And, you know, so we're looking in the wrong direction when we look for China.
And, you know, I think that's, you know, that that's just one of several things that are playing out here.
The good news about that is that the Chinese are going to deploy a lot of this new technology and will avoid some of their carbon pollution.
The bad news about it is that we're going to have to come to them to access some of this technology.
Well thank God somebody's doing it, but it should be us.
It should have been us.
At least somebody is doing it.
So I guess the Chinese will be exporting all these things and we'll be buying them and that will extend what's going on right now and eventually all the money will be there instead of in the U.S.
That simplifies matters but really that is what's going on.
There's a shift in, it's going to be a shift in who's rich and who's poor and that's what it's eventually going to be and we're taking steps it seems to me right now to assure that we're the ones or the United States will be the ones that are going to be on the poor end of things and Maybe that's the way the world works.
Somehow I thought the U.S.
with its Constitution, its Bill of Rights, all those wonderful things that we tout so much would keep us on the right track.
And in fact, it seems to have led us in the wrong direction.
Listen, we've got one more hour coming up, Larry.
I wonder if you would be willing to answer some questions of callers.
Oh, sure.
Terrific.
Okay.
Do you have another book planned?
And how long has this book been out now?
Well, the book came out in September, and at this moment I have another book in mind.
I don't want to announce it yet, but clearly I've seen a lot since I've written a book, and there's plenty to write about these days.
The incredible spill and some of the additional changes we've seen.
But I think I might take a larger look in terms of how we're treating the biological diversity of our planet.
And not just in terms of what we're doing climatically, but what we're doing ecologically as well to the planet.
Indeed.
Alright, stay right where you are Larry, and when we come back, we will do as I suggested.
We're going to open the phone lines, listen very carefully as we come back, they'll give you the numbers, and it's your chance to talk with the Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation, Larry Schweiger.
From Manila, in the Philippines, all islands, I'm Art Bell.
Good morning all.
Here I am.
Larry Schweiger is my guest.
He's the Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation.
This is your opportunity to ask him questions.
I've certainly monopolized the first part of the show with him.
So many questions.
And now it's your turn.
So, that's what we're going to do when we get back, which we will in a moment.
By the way, as always, I'd love to hear from you.
Feel free to email me.
I answer all those that I'm able to.
I'm artbell, A-R-T-B-L-L at mindspring.com.
That's M-I-N-D-S-P-R-I-N-G dot com, artbell at mindspring.com.
All right, Larry, if you're ready, we're going to go to the phones.
Great.
So, prepare yourself.
Here we go.
Westport, California.
You're on the air with Larry Schweiger.
Good morning.
Good morning, Art and Larry.
My question is about what's going on in the Gulf with that oil spew, but a quick reference to that 7.1 earthquake in Solomon Island.
Yes.
There's a partial eclipse of the moon that starts about the time the show ends tonight, and that will be visible in the West Coast.
PDT 6 a.m.
setting into the Ocean, but the point being once again, Jim Berkman's work really seems to be again affirmed.
Now my question concerning the oil spew is with all that black oil on the surface absorbing heat, then the 255 plus fires that are on the surface spewing smoke into the atmosphere along with more heat and the dispersants causing further evaporation.
Some of the chemicals in those dispersants, I believe, Are related to the same thing as chemtrails, which are for weather modification.
We've had a couple of horrible floods, one in Arkansas, one in Oklahoma, some battering weather off Cape Cod and tornadoes clear up into the Canadian area.
And the recent weather pattern has been blowing due north across the Gulf and catching that stream that comes across from the West with huge storms.
Plus, two hurricanes in the eastern Pacific Probably generated from the moisture in that Gulf area, one of which is a Cat 5 and could swing towards Hawaii.
It appears to me, quite frankly, that maybe this stuff will trigger that global superstorm.
And I'm curious as to whether we should be looking for traces of oil and dispersants in the water that's coming down in these areas to see if this billionaire polluters, BP, are going beyond just the perimeter of the Gulf.
I mean, we had white sands that are now black.
There's a huge amount of extra heat in that area, and I think it is directly affecting weather way beyond just the Gulf itself.
And, of course, the whole atmosphere and the environment.
And I'd like both of your takes on that as a storm tracker, Art, and what you've seen in the past, too.
Thank you.
Sure.
OK.
You want to tackle that one?
Yeah.
Let me start by saying that certainly black oil on the surface of water will cause the water to absorb more energy.
But there are several other factors at play here.
One, the heavy use of dispersants has pretty much removed a lot of the oil from the surface.
So we're seeing these threads or remnants of these tar balls that we see showing up on the beaches.
But for the most part, the oil is below the surface, as I mentioned earlier, because of the dispersants.
There are some chemicals going into the atmosphere.
I flew over the oil spill.
At about 3000 feet elevation and certainly can smell the dispersants in the air.
But I think the larger climate change phenomenons that we're seeing, particularly these intense storms, you know, the scientists have been warning us for a number of years now that we're going to start to see an uptick in the intensity of storms and The duration of rainfall events, for example.
And, you know, I think we're seeing that.
Of course, scientists always use the caveat that you can't link one storm to one, you know, to the changing climate.
But clearly, all the patterns are moving in the direction that the scientists have predicted.
I think this has more to do with the carbon we put in the sky than the carbon we're putting in the Gulf at the moment.
Because we're talking about such a huge scale of carbon pollution in our atmosphere that it's, even though it's invisible, it is extraordinarily large.
I just, maybe I'm wrong.
You know, when I was younger, I was a Republican myself, many years, a decade, more than a decade ago.
I became a Libertarian.
And then the environmental mess I guess moved me a little further and I just, politically, I'm so libertarian, very much so, but I see this, my God, I see this as something that is threatening our existence and to not pay attention to that, to not begin to actually do something is just beyond everything I know and can imagine.
Anyway, wildcard line, I hope, wildcard line, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Hey, Art.
God bless you.
My name is Cornelius.
I'm from Alexandria, Louisiana.
I'm about 200 miles from New Orleans.
And I wanted to tell you and the Coast to Coast listeners, Mr. Larry and George and your call screener, Jason.
God bless y'all.
Y'all been praying for us and stuff, so I really do appreciate that.
Art, I had called you on the... You know, when you had your prediction line, I said the Saints would win the Super Bowl and it'd be the end of the world.
And it looks like it's about happening.
So I just wanted to say thank you and we all appreciate your art.
Right.
Thank you very much for the call and take care.
I guess I've gone through a transition in my life and people have been listening to me for decades, have been along for that ride.
But this whole environmental issue and what's going on in the world is what I think has pushed me in this direction.
Let's say good morning.
I believe on the international line you're on the air with Larry Schwager.
Hello?
Hello.
Oh, okay.
Hi Art.
Hey Larry.
Well, a bit of a comment and a question for each of you.
One was, I'm sure you've probably heard about wetricity, wireless electricity, like, you know, how it converts electricity into a magnetic wave and everything.
And yeah, well, anyway, I think if we, like, use a form of taxation and actually supply free electricity to the entire world, we could, we'll end our dependence on oil for one thing.
And on top of that, I think if we boost the magnetic field of the Earth enough, we might be able to stop the charged particles and electromagnetic radiation coming from the sun from destroying our own electrical infrastructure.
Well, I don't know how we provide free electricity to everybody.
I don't have a clue how we do that.
Nothing in life is free, and that includes solar panels, wind generation, ocean, wave generation, hydroelectric, all of it.
Nothing is free, so I don't know about providing free stuff to everybody, but beginning to move in all of those directions is something that, ladies and gentlemen, if we don't do, I mean, that's about it for us.
That's how I feel these days.
Good morning, you're on the air.
I think that'd be first time caller line.
Hello, Art?
Hi, yes.
Yeah, I'm Bob Cart.
New Orleans, WRNO.
Great to have you back on, sir.
Missed you.
Great to be here.
I really wish it was a happier subject to be covering than this.
I do too.
Congratulations on your family.
There are some crazy rumors going around on Facebook that workers are, first of all, Coming down with, this is on Google, it's hard to find also, it's hard to find this information because it seems like it's being so well controlled that people are dropping dead with, according to one of these workers, who seems scared to death of a flu-like symptom that's resistant to over-the-counter cold medication.
Also, that whales are being blown up, and that helicopters are flying over and picking up dolphins.
That this thing is much worse than we're being told.
Good morning, Larry.
I wanted to get your take on it, Art, because you always got your finger on the pulse of this stuff.
Are we being told everything?
What's going on?
Well, I think it's a really good question.
BP has gotten basically permission to create zones around their activities where they can basically control Those who are on the water.
I've encountered this in several locations now in our in our travels.
We're, you know, BP doesn't want the media to see the cleanup operations.
They don't want us, they don't want them to be near the oiled birds and obviously they want to try to hide the number of species that are dying and being contaminated.
So we know that there are more All right.
for example, that are getting oiled and we hear about.
In fact, that's one of our efforts is to try to identify these birds before they die and to try to get as many
into rescue operations as possible.
But, you know, if we're lucky, we'll maybe identify 10% of the total fish and wildlife species that are being
impacted.
In the case of marine mammals, the same is true.
You know, we know there's one sperm whale that showed up dead,
but the total number may be much larger.
We just, you know, the...
There's just a lot of unknowns out there, and because the Coast Guard has given BP such control, not a lot is being seen by the medium.
Larry, it's worth exploring a little further.
There really are a lot of rumors out there that Acting behind the scenes, whoever it is, is somehow sweeping away as best they can the dead wildlife, protecting the PR image, and that in fact it is a hell of a lot worse than we're seeing.
Americans, like people of other countries, Larry, are subjected to, we'll call it PR, or maybe that could stand for being propagandized, but it is the case.
Could that be going on right now?
Is that going on right now?
Well, I think certainly BP would like you to see the world through its lens.
And it is working hard to do that.
It hired former Vice President Cheney's PR person to help, you know, spin the story.
And, you know, and I think since, you know, since that day, they've been a little more effective at containing some of these stories.
One of the things that they did, for example, was to hire up all the charter boat captains To basically sit on the docks at BP's operation rather than take a media out onto the water.
So, you know, we were taking at 1.5 boats out on the water every day.
And we're now down to one or two boats because the other captains have been hired by BP to basically, you know, drink coffee and hang out.
So, you know, it's, you know, it's clear that they want to shut down The media attention.
There's no doubt about that at all.
Anyone who's around there has seen it and knows that it's true.
And the full extent of this will not be, it may never be known.
Because, you know, wildlife die and are lost in the system and we just don't know about them.
Right.
Wildcard Line, good morning.
You're on the air with Larry Schweiger and Mark Bell.
Hello, yes.
Oh, hi.
That's me.
Yeah, so, I mean, I try to be optimistic in general, but it just seems so beyond hope.
I mean, general common sense tells you that all of this oil being spewed into the ocean, I mean, until August?
Actually, at the very least, it ought to be noted here that there's no guarantee that these relief wells are going to cure the problem.
No guarantee at all.
And then you look at what's behind it and the power that's behind it that has brought us to this point.
I'm rereading Family of Secrets and I'm at the beginning again and I just got to the point where they were talking about Eisenhower.
He knew because he was like their first project.
And he saw it and he knew.
That's why he knew.
And this is the same people that are doing this to us, to the planet.
It just seems so... I feel so powerless.
Writing a letter to my congressman, it just doesn't really seem like it's going to do anything.
How do we stop this?
Because this is just...
I can't, there's just no words.
I can't even.
I know, I know.
It's devastating in every sense of the word and this helpless feeling is just really maddening.
Okay, excellent point.
You know, that's a very, okay, excellent point.
Larry, what does any, what can any individual do right now?
Is there anything realistically that anybody can do?
I can hear the frustration in her voice and I share it.
I hear that as well and I have to say that if you look back over time, I remember back in the 80s being very, very troubled by acid rain and its damage on our landscape.
We went to Senator John Hines and others, and Senator Hines took this up for us, but we had to marshal the public to be a part of the solution.
And I'm pleased to say that we were able to get an acid rain bill passed, and today we have reduced that problem by more than 50%.
So there are solutions out there, and it's a matter of us working together.
And I believe that by collectively standing up, we can, in fact, we must change our energy course.
And that, to me, is the key question at this moment.
If we allow ourselves to be caught up in the dismay and disappointment and just give up on On our system, we will continue to see the kind of things that we've been witnessing recently happen more and more.
I think it really is.
There's another tipping point, and that tipping point is that the American people wake up and demand more leadership from Congress and from every aspect of our federal government to tackle problems like this, to not try to sweep them under the Okay.
Let's go quickly east of the Rockies.
You're on the air.
Good morning.
Hello?
Yes, hello.
with them head on. And so I think it is frustrated and angry people at the end of the day that
will change the course of this thing.
Okay. Let's go quickly east of the Rockies. You're on the air. Good morning.
Hello?
Yes, hello. Go ahead, sir.
Larry, I've been listening to you all night and I disagree with most of the things you're
saying, especially when you're slamming the Republicans.
Now, I know when I make my statement, you're going to spin it in some way.
So what I'd like to do now is say if anyone's really interested in this subject, that you get a book called Energy Victory.
By Robert Zubrin.
Z-U-B-R-I-N.
Read that book.
And you'll see, it's called Energy Victory.
You'll see that there's a solution to our environmental problems, our energy independence problems, our transportation problems.
And it's American technology, invented in the 70s.
Brazil is using it.
To a great success, but we are going, we're following all the failed models in the world.
Cap and trade, all this baloney.
All we have to do is legislate that every car sold in the United States is a flex fuel vehicle.
That's a vehicle that runs either on gasoline, ethanol, or methanol, or any combination of the three.
All right, we're woefully short on time.
I guess it's one of those things where you've got to read the book.
And so I allowed you to get that out there.
And I guess it's fine that people would read it.
And I don't know if we're slamming Republicans.
They're a big part of this country.
It's just that we're headed in the wrong direction.
And in fact, the Republicans are, to some degree, blocking legislation.
That could begin to head us in the right direction, but I'm also complaining about a president who could seize on this terrible tragedy as an opportunity to sit down with the American people and say, look, either we do this now or, or else.
Truly, or else.
From Manila in the Philippines, another break point already.
Good morning, I'm Art Bell.
We own the night, and have for a long time.
Welcome to Coast to Coast AM everybody.
The Chief Executive Officer of the National Wildlife Federation is my guest, Larry Schweiger, and we're discussing the oil spill.
The climate, what's going on in our world right now, and I guess politics because it's unavoidable in this venue.
It's really unavoidable.
And I understand that once you take a stance, whatever it is, you're going to have half or better than half of the people upset with you.
But there comes a time when everybody has got to, I don't know, say what they feel Or it's going to be too late.
And if we don't get moving, folks, pretty quickly, it's going to be too late.
That time we've all been talking about, that tipping point, is getting very close.
We've got to do something very soon.
If we don't, well, a lot of you have children and grandchildren.
They're going to be in a very, very different world than we live in right now.
We'll be right back.
All right, once again, and quickly, back to the phones.
Wild Card Line, good morning.
You're on the air with Larry Schweiger, I hope.
Good morning, Art.
What an honor and privilege it is to speak with you again, my friend.
This is T.J.
K7CV.
Okay, you ought not identify yourself in that manner, but go right ahead.
Thank you, Art.
And listen, I'd like to draw your recollection briefly to November of 2003, just prior to the presidential election, when you had hosted on KNYE a talk show where specifically we discussed whether or not we should be formulating a national energy policy in the United States.
And then during that show, you afforded me the great opportunity to be able to discuss with you as well as with Jim and Greg This very specific discussion, and I had promoted the fact that the administration then, as well as previous administrations, has been negligent in the United States presidency that they should form the equivalent of a Manhattan Project to quickly identify and develop alternate forms of fuel energy for the United States so as to get us off of the tendency of Middle Eastern oil, not just for economic reasons, but for national security reasons.
And in light of what we're dealing with now, this horrible disaster, I mean, we are dealing with things that I fear are just on the horizon that is going to be more unbelievable than what we're already dealing with.
I mean, we're dealing with GMO modified food crops in this country that are devastating food crops.
They're putting us on the brink of famine.
We're dealing with the issue of honeybees that are dying off mysteriously that the best and brightest scientists can identify what the cause is.
And now we understand because rain clouds are formulated over the seas with these horribly toxins and not just the oil but in this unidentified solvents that BP is using that they refuse to identify to the United States government what it consists of because they hide behind the excuse of it being a confidential formulation.
You know, what's going to happen when rain clouds form and they start to rain over our crops?
These toxins, that's going to destroy the bees, the food, get into the food chain and make us sick.
And my God, the poor people down there have lost their livelihoods.
I mean, we're talking to millions of people.
I mean, we think the Wall Street disaster in 2008 and 2009 was horrible.
Wait until this happens.
I mean, we learned Many years ago, that whenever there's a big hit on the economy, it takes anywhere from 9 to 12 months before it actually trickles down throughout the rest of the economy and infects all Americans.
And my question to your distinguished guest, I would like to ask, in fact, plead with you, Larry, please.
You are in a very unique position in history, quite literally, where you have the ear of
a very distinguished former Vice President of the United States who has a lot of integrity
and character and who has been at the forefront of defending the environment as well as promoting
the development of alternate fuels.
I would like to ask you respectfully, sir, when you visit with your friend this weekend,
will you please ask him, plead with him on behalf of the American public, to shift his
platform and to put focus and effort and pressure on the current administration to literally
develop immediately, put together the equivalent of a Manhattan Project to start developing
alternate forms of energy to get us off of oil, to get us away from the dangers that
we're facing now.
And Art, it's been a pleasure.
I appreciate and respect you tremendously.
We love you and we wish you well.
OK, my friend.
And if you would like to tackle that one, Larry, please proceed.
Well, let me say that Al Gore about two years ago gave a very powerful speech in Washington, D.C.
called Repower America.
You can find it online if it's still out there.
And it's worth watching because, in fact, that's what he called for, was that we shift our energy To a new energy source within 10 years and that we commit ourselves to a full scale effort that would use the example of President Kennedy's calling for a man on the moon within 10 years.
We did it far short of that, but we can do if we make up our mind, we can do a lot in this country, and it's just a matter of having the will and the political Horsepower to get decisions done.
And certainly, I don't want to speak for the former vice president, but he has been working very hard on that very topic for a long time.
If our president doesn't do this soon, it's going to be too late.
His political capital is rapidly evaporating.
And new presidents, particularly with the kind of problems his president has with our economy and now the oil spill, He's just not going to be able to have the political oomph to get it done if it's not done very, very quickly.
So, I don't know.
It saddens me.
Let's go to, I guess it would be east of the Rockies or west of the Rockies.
I'm not sure they're not marked here.
You're on the air.
Good morning.
Hello?
Hello?
Yes, sir.
It is you, yes.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Good morning, gentlemen.
I guess I've got two statements to make, and I'd like to sort of hear your comment on it.
My first one, if every new home built today in America was a self-efficient home as far as generating its own power, and if they generate too much power, putting it back in the grid, I know you need transformers of that nature, and it would be more of an expensive process on the house.
I'd say $30,000 to $40,000 more for a home.
But I feel that technology then, if that was mandated, technology would grow enough that that technology could be adapted into homes that are presently built.
That's my first comment.
My second comment, now, wasn't Congress established to voice the people's... Hold on.
Congress was established to speak for the people, if I'm correct, right?
Yes.
Okay.
That was back in...
Eons ago, when that was established, where we did not have automobiles, we did not have telephones, we did not have the internet.
Couldn't we get rid of Congress now that we have all of this?
That would be a parliamentary system, sir, where they just get rid of people the moment they're unhappy with them.
Larry?
Well, I think I'd like to address particularly the first part of that question.
You know, when I bought my first computer, it was an Apple II, and it was a real clunky thing, and it had these big floppy disk drives, and it had an impact printer with it.
The total bill for that computer was like $9,000, and it barely could type a memo without having to float on and catch up.
to the floppy disk.
But I share that with you because I think the technology, once we start down the path to a new energy technology, we're going to see a couple things happen.
One, the price of solar is going to drop quite dramatically.
The efficiency will go up dramatically.
And I think those are the kinds of things that will happen once we decide to do that.
And until we until we move in that direction, we're going to have, you know, have higher costs.
But I think clearly, if we commit to a new energy pathway, we'll see dramatic breakthroughs, and we'll see the cost come tumbling down.
And the important thing is having the public policy in place that drives that we saw that with the with the telephone, you know, when they passed a law, changing the rules, All of a sudden, we had cell phone tires everywhere, and we've seen a tremendous transformation in the telephone industry in the last 20 years.
We've seen the same thing with the Internet.
Tremendous transformation as a result of a law that basically allowed people to set up their own websites and that sort of thing.
So, you know, we've seen in the past when we pass the right kind of legal framework That it actually stimulates incredible economic development and also stimulates lower costs.
And I think that's what we're waiting for with energy.
And that's why, frankly, so many people are fighting so hard to keep it from happening.
Because if we turn this corner and move towards highly efficient homes and homes that produce electricity in their windows and on the rooftops, We're going to have a different game and everyone is going to be able to play in that game because we're all going to be producers of energy and not just consumers.
And so it will shift the table quite heavily in the direction of the consumer.
And I think that's part of the dynamic that's playing out here.
So, you know, in my mind, it's a matter of setting the policy in place first.
And, you know, we have a congressional system.
We just need to make it work.
It's up to us to be the lubricant to force our senators and House members to do the right thing.
And once we do that, we'll see a tremendous opportunity for new jobs and for truly a green economy coming out of this dark age of carbon.
Well, Larry, I think that's going to be the game all right.
It's just that I think the major player in the game is going to be closer to me here in the Philippines than to you there.
Let's go to the, oh I guess perhaps the first time caller line.
You're on the air.
Hi.
Hi.
Can you hear me?
I hear you indeed.
Okay.
Thank you so much for taking my call.
Larry, I can't think of anybody I'd rather be speaking to, and this is my first call tonight, and I just feel so privileged to be able to speak with you.
My husband and I have a registered wildlife habitat in the city of Garden Grove, California.
Oh, wonderful!
And we've made our home a haven for wildlife for as long as we've been here.
And I happen to be along the ilk of a consultant to Master Gardeners.
And by the way, to address one of your earlier callers, we have plenty of bees.
The problem is there's no habitat.
It's dwindling.
And I find that what we really need to be saying out there is getting the message across.
of what people need to be doing because they're lost.
They follow trends.
They don't really know what they need to be doing to help the environment, to address the politicians,
who to write to.
And KFI does a really good job of this during the day with the hot topics.
You know, they say who to write, who to call, who to email.
And I think the Wildlife Federation could help in that respect, in that regard too, either via the internet in some way.
Get the word out because people are hungry for the information.
They just need the direction.
And we give tours.
We belong to a koi club.
We have water gardens and lilies and, you know, all the different things that wildlife needs to survive.
And man needs to learn to accept to be willing to live with wildlife all over the globe.
And if they want to save their environment and save other species, they have to accept that.
And so if you can just help get that word out, what people need to be doing and you will find they're hungry for that information.
They want to learn how to save their climate and their environment and live with other species.
Alright, well listen, we're short on time, but thank you very much for the call and of course that's what your organization is doing and has always done, right Larry?
Yes, in fact, if folks want to learn more about it, please go to nwf.org and you can learn a lot about everything from backyard habitats that were mentioned.
And if you look at our oil spill site, we also have a large section on climate change and on wildlife.
And also, we spend a lot of our effort trying to bring more kids into the outdoors and through both backyard habitat programs and green Green Hour and No Child Left Inside and a number of other important programs.
So I would encourage listeners to check our website out.
Okay.
Wild Card Line, good morning.
You're on the air with Larry Schweiger and Art Bell.
Hi, Art.
This is Larry in Fort Lauderdale.
It's been a while.
Hi.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
Quick comment and a question.
I feel that we have to start looking at the Earth more like a spaceship.
And when companies poke a hole in the bottom of the earth in an area that man cannot reach with two hands or does something stupid in the atmosphere, it's sort of like opening the door on a spaceship.
And we have to have some laws, maybe international laws, that say, wait a minute, some of this stuff that you're doing is so cataclysmic that if something happens, you just can't do it unless you have two or three relief wells that are, you know, within 10 feet of the main one, you know, to stop something that's happening here.
That was my comment.
The question was, I feel that, and this is for the BP people listening in too, is that they're stonewalling us.
I can just see their corporate counsels filtering everything that comes out of there.
And if they were to be more transparent and allow the news people to show the lower level people that are operating the ROVs and do some voiceover of what they're trying to do, it might go a million dollars in publicity for them and also uh... let the american public know that people are trying
to do something to take some of the stress and tension away because they see
that you know the the the reagan file people are trying to cap
this thing are trying to do stuff but i can see a very heavy hand in the full
page ad and in their statements they're talking point and it's very very
transparent in today's environment that the corporate attorneys may have written
off the company and they're just trying to keep the c e o's out of jail
that was my question You know, I had actually thought the same thing.
Very good call.
In other words, we get to see the pictures of the gushing oil and We only can guess at what's going on.
Some sort of narrative, much the way NASA has provided so many times with the visuals they've given us, probably would be a good PR idea.
Obviously, BP is doing all they can right now to shut the damn thing down.
And that would be a good PR move, I think, for BP to explain to people what they're actually doing and what we're actually seeing.
Or maybe that's too much to ask.
Larry?
Well, those are really good points.
I think, particularly going back to the original point, which is that we're allowing people to do things that are very, very dangerous.
And, you know, we need to have good plans in place before we do that and understand the full implications.
And that's why this decision by this local judge who incidentally owns stock in eight oil companies to go back to drilling offshore is just so appalling, because he's basically saying, turn your headlights off and continue to drive down the highway.
And that's, that's irrational.
And, you know, I think the President and the administration have been trying to be prudent here.
When you've got a judge telling you not to be prudent, it's really, really troubling.
It is.
It is absolutely amazing to me as well.
When something of this magnitude happens that you don't stop for whatever period of time is required to figure out what in the hell went wrong so it doesn't happen again.
I'm aware there are other wells, deeper wells in fact, than the one that blew up and is giving us a problem right now.
And so, yes, of course you pause.
Larry, it has been My pleasure, believe me, to have you on the air with us tonight.
The time is all gone.
Program's over and that's it.
Well, thank you.
Thank you, my friend, and I hope your book sells well.
Okay, thanks so much.
Take care, and again folks, anybody who'd like to email me, you're welcome to do so.
I'm Art Bell at MindSpring.com, and I fully expect the flames to be probably larger than those in the Gulf.
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