ClimateOne

Greg Dalton:  Welcome to Climate One, a conversation about America’s energy, economy and environment.  I’m Greg Dalton.  Today we’re discussing climate change and clean energy in the traditional news media.  In the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain and Barrack Obama supported a cap-and-trade program for reducing carbon pollution.  But in this year’s election, candidates barely mention the climate, which has become a dirty word.  Media coverage of climate concerns is down though surging gasoline prices are prompting stories about fossil fuels, renewable energy and more efficient cars.  In California, the state is marching ahead with its own cap-and-trade program and efforts to promote solar, wind and other forms of clean electricity.  For the next hour we’ll look behind the headlines of America’s energy debate with our live audience here at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.  We’re pleased to be joined by two veteran reporters.  Felicity Barringer of the New York Times, environment reporter in San Francisco, and Marc Lifsher, a business reporter in Sacramento with the Los Angeles Times.  Please welcome them to Climate One.

[Applause]

Greg Dalton:  Did I say that right, Barringer?

Felicity Barringer:  You did.  You said it absolutely right which is -- congratulations.  I swear…

Greg Dalton:  I should have checked.  Felicity, let's begin with you.  Let's set the national context for energy, sort of the narrative as this is happening right now.   In a presidential election year, climate is not what it used to be, but what's the overarching narrative right now in energy and climate nationally?

Felicity Barringer:  Well, I think if you compare it to 2008, you've got two fairly big differences.  And, of course, we’re early in the election cycle yet.  We haven't really seen the two parties actually, the two candidates…

Greg Dalton:  Really?  It seems like it's been going on for so long.  

Felicity Barringer:  I know.  

Greg Dalton:  But yes, okay.

Felicity Barringer:  I know.  But if you compare it to 2008, the two things that were striking in 2008, as you mentioned, were the -- both candidates talking about cap-and-trade in a very positive way, and talking about climate, particularly President Obama at the time, and also the drill, baby, drill mantra...

Greg Dalton:  Oh yes.

Felicity Barringer:  …which we forget.  So now you fast forward to 2012, as you say, climate is present by its absence from virtually all discussions except perhaps in Texas where they talk about drought, not climate but drought and then -- and in other parts of the West too.  And instead of drill baby drill, you have two auxiliary issues at the fore, one is the Keystone Pipeline and the other is the question of possible environmental harm from fracking, or hydraulic fracturing to get natural gas out of the ground.  So this is a kind of atomization of the energy discussion on that.  I'd be interested to hear what Marc has to say as to where it might go from here.

Greg Dalton:  Marc, you want to take that?  Sure.

Marc Lifsher:  I think what you have is absence of the environmental issue from the national debate other than the kind of a quasi religious thing that's going on where Santorum says that who are we to, you know -- God gave the earth to us and we should do whatever we want with it.  Other than he said, she said that’s going on nationally what you see in California is California is doing what's it's done ever since the 60’s which is basically go its own way.  California for good or for ill sometimes has always been head of the rest of the country and set the pace for the rest of the country.  And you had that with air pollution laws early on -- LA was and is about the most polluted city in the country -- and water pollution laws, and California was a pioneer in energy efficiency standard started out in the first Perry Brown administration.  And since then it saved a lot of electricity by just being more efficient without needing more fuel of any type.  And California is with the dearth of any action, nationally, California is still carrying that flame.  And you see it in -- they just passed standards for power supplies, for mobile products, phones and TVs and whatnot.  They keep irritating the national manufacturing and the electronics association but they can't do much about it because it's such a big part of the market.

Greg Dalton:  And then there are other things like TVs and refrigerators before that.  Let's pick up on the sort of the two side issues or the atomization that Felicity Barringer mentioned, Keystone XL and fracking, and talk about how those are playing in the debate.  First let's talk about Keystone.  I don’t think people -- the first leg of this pipeline was built a few years ago with not much fuss and now it's become this huge political issue.  

Felicity Barringer:  Now, again, I think it's a way for, particularly the environmental movement to focus on an indirect consequence of climate, you know.  They are saying on the one hand it's a siting issue, as they say, in the business’ jargon for where you're going to put something with might be deemed obnoxious.  Siting pipes is not really been an issue hardly ever in America.  Now there are some questions as to whether due diligence was done, whether there was enough community buy-in along the route, but I think the bottom line argument that is giving energy to this discussion is we’re taking a fossil fuel out of the ground and pushing it hundreds of miles to this other coast of the United States and we shouldn't be taking fossil -- we shouldn't be using fossil fuels.  And there's an alternative argument, of course, which is we can't stop using all fossil fuels today without the economies of the world collapsing.  We've had enough trouble with the close, you know, the close call and the collapse back in 2008.  So nobody is really eager for that.  So what are we going to do to take the world and the United States and California from where they are today in terns of use of fossil fuels and move them to a place where fossil fuels are very much less important?

Marc Lifsher:  That oil is going to come out of the ground and it's going to be upgraded from heavy crude to a nice sweet crude.  And the pipeline is just going to go west and it’s going to go on a tanker and go to China or wherever, and it's going to be burned and go into the atmosphere and contribute to global warning in the same way as if it went down to Texas.  

Greg Dalton:  It's very valuable and it’ll find a market somewhere where someone will burn it because of growing global energy demand.  How about fracking, how’s fracking playing into the debate right now?

Felicity Barringer:  Well, fracking, I think the industry, and Marc, correct me if I'm wrong here, I think the industry may have felt just a little bit blind sided because other shales elsewhere in the country, in Oklahoma and Texas, have been proactive.  The whole -- the same process is going on.  Liquids pumped deep, deep underground, up to a mile underground, to disturb the rock, liquids and chemical compounds, to sort of disturb the rock and get the gas loose from where it's in very tight formations.  That's gone on in Wyoming, in the Jonah Field, in their Pindale, that's going on in Texas, that's going on in Oklahoma.  So bingo!  You come to the Marcella Show which is sort of in the backyard of the East Coast Megalopolis, and it becomes a major issue.  And I think it's not too surprising with the natural gas industry was a little bit blind sided by that.  That said, they've been not entirely forthcoming about what's in the chemical substance.  Clearly, those of who who’ve seen the move Gasland have seen water and people -- kitchen sinks lit on fire.  It's, you know, very, very effective television and very effective video.  So that, obviously, some methane has leaked like the well in the Gulf, they didn’t do a very good job of making sure that things that were supposed to be inside the pipe stayed inside the pipe.  So that, again, is an awful lot of bad, you know, things that are clearly not great for the environment.  But are you going to weigh that against using the oil that we have which is much worse in terms of greenhouse gas emissions?

Marc Lifsher:  Not to mention coal.

Felicity Barringer:  Yeah.  Thank you.  Not to mention coal.  Or use natural gas as a transition fuel to a better day which a lot of people make the argument for?  So again, I think fracking is getting a lot of play right now.  It should -- the gas companies should be, you know, aware of what they're doing but I think the larger context is sometimes missed.

Marc Lifsher:  And then you got to --I don’t think that people in the Northeast are going to mind paying less to heat their homes in the winter because the price of gas is totally plummeted.  It was only in ’05, I recall, that there were plans to build at least a dozen liquefied natural gas -- regasification plants on the West Coast and on the Gulf Coast and on the East Coast and bring the stuff in from Australia.  And every one of those, except for maybe one, have gone belly up.  And the enviros hated that, you know.

Greg Dalton:  And now there's talk of the U.S. being an exporter of natural gas whereas few years ago we might have been an importer.  It's knocking out nuclear which some enviros like but it's also knocking out renewables which enviros don’t like.  It's very complicated, the gas story.  Let's talk about what's driving some of these coverage.  Are these stories that are out there or the news media are responding to politicians or things or -- let's talk about what's really -- what's driving the narrative, the energy narrative.

Felicity Barringer:  Well, I mean I think, again, the elephant in the room is climate change and that has become…

Greg Dalton:  And no one is talking about it.

Felicity Barringer:  …I was going to say, yeah, that has become the subject that they dare not speak its name and therefore people are using other things to talk about.  The two major subjects are the energy future and what does it mean for climate change and how do we work those two out as a nation.  And as with everything else in the country now, there’s such division.  The notion that you can't mention climate change in a Republican primary except to denigrate it.  Again, just five, six years ago I was at hearing on Capital Hill when Al Gore is sort of first major public appearance, this was before An Inconvenient Truth, just before it, and it was his first major public appearance since the 2000 election -- maybe it was seven years ago -- and there was a bunch of House Republicans, some of them talking the way the people in the Republican primaries are talking now.  But at least one Republican from Maryland, a kind of crusty old guy said, “Just because I'm a Republican doesn’t mean I'm a fool or an idiot.”  I mean there was a time when it was okay for Republicans to acknowledge what the science seems to be saying on this, and this is not that time.  So you have these two major issues and I think, again, because the climate discussion isn't being engaged because it's become toxic, you have these auxiliary issues of proxies for it.

Greg Dalton:  How about inside the editorial meetings and newsrooms at the Los Angeles Times and New York Times.  I mean do you shy away from climate stories because it's not on the table, because the politicians are not putting it on the table?

Marc Lifsher:  Well, in Sacramento I don’t attend a lot of those.  

Greg Dalton:  Lucky you.

Marc Lifsher:  But -- no I mean the whole issue is the climate changing, is the earth warning, that maybe -- that went from being kind of mostly decided in the public place to being political issue where people were still fighting about that basic question.  That's what's happening now.  We had, you know, President Bush and McCain, they all agreed that there was climate change.  And now that's not under agreement and there’s all these conspiracy theories and such.  But -- so I think in the papers -- and it's not an organized -- it's not organized how things wind up in the paper.  It's a lot more random than the layman may think.  I mean first of all reporters get ideas, people call in, sources, documents, bosses, supervisors hear something on NPR driving to work, it's all kinds of things like that, but there are still a lot of stories.  Some of them are driven by the campaign, the President’s campaign like we've just been talking about, but after you mentioned a survey that said that there was less coverage, I just look back to the last four months to try and get up to speed in the LA Times archives and there were stories to one degree or another about global warning, climate change, renewable energy, et cetera, almost everyday there were something big or small.  So I don’t think that it's -- by a half dozen reporter on different beats, in different parts of the paper.  So I think it's getting covered, you just can't keep the, you know, the waters are rising everyday but just in the Seychilles Island where -- I think it was last week the prime minister -- is it the Maldives?

Greg Dalton:  Yeah.  The president is ousted.

Marc Lifsher:  Yeah.  He got overthrown and, you know, he was all about we’re going to lose the islands or we’re going to be under water in no time.  So it came up even in that context.

Felicity Barringer:  And there are also recently been developments in the effort to kind of prosecute or go after climate scientists, you know.  The Supreme Court in Virginia not long ago said no to the state attorney general who wanted to subpoena the emails and grant applications of Michael Mann who is the scientist dissociated with the famous hockey stick graph.  And so there are -- there are things happening that are kind of immediate stories that get covered in an immediate sense.  But I'd also say is that as for that study that said the coverage was down, one, yes, if there's not an immediate electoral or a legislative controversy you don’t get the sort of extra juice of the coverage from the legislative reporters which, you know, goes into the whole total.  But I have a colleague, Justin Gillis, who does enormously valuable takeouts on things like glacial ice or sea level rise or…

Greg Dalton:  Permafrost.

Felicity Barringer:  Yeah, permafrost.  Some of these, you know, what's happening in Greenland and what does it mean.  These are magnificent pieces of work.  They get into the nuance.  The paper gives them a huge amount of space.  Justin gets a great deal of time to work on them.  It's all -- you know, this is what I think newspapers should be doing in a period when the daily news isn't providing sparks for coverage.  But each of those counts in this kind of survey as one article.  Well, okay.  And it counts the same as a blog post I might do in an hour.

Greg Dalton:  So how it's measures, how it's counted matters.  But would you agree that generally there were some peaks around An Inconvenient Truth, peaks around Copenhagen and since that time there's been sort of a lowering of some coverage because it's not front and center in the political agenda and because, as Marc said, we kind of covered that?  Well, we've done sea level rise.  Until it rises some more, okay, we've done…

Marc Lifsher:  But look at the Solyndra issue.  Look how much coverage that generated.  

Greg Dalton:  Did it get too much?

Marc Lifsher:  No.  I don’t think it got too much.  It was an interesting subject.  And the subject of these federal supports for this project is really interesting and it's taxpayer money.  But I did one story that noted while  Solyndra was a big scandal, by the end of the year, California had approved and the feds had approved about $7 billion worth of these big solar projects out in the desert and they were all kind of going through the process full steam ahead.  Now they run into problems, environmental problems, law suits, et cetera, financial, but they were all pushed out by Schwarzenegger and Brown in about eight months in quite a remarkable show of determination.

Felicity Barringer:  With the interior department locked arm and arm with them.

Marc Lifsher:  Totally.  Yeah.  And just, you know, on the fracking issue, the New York Times did some tremendous work, numerous, long articles, right literally in their backyard which was quite impressive.

Greg Dalton:  We’re talking about media coverage and climate change with Marc Lifsher from the Los Angeles Times and Felicity Barringer from the New York Times.  How has the shrinking newspaper industry affected coverage?  Fewer people doing these stories?  Has that -- had been an impact at all?  Marc Lifsher?

Marc Lifsher:  Yeah.  I think that's impacted all papers.  Now, the bigger paper was a start with in terms of staff, the better it is to continue coverage.  But we have -- we have fewer reporters who deal with various aspects of the environment than we used to.  We used to have quite an army, now we have a fairly large squad, you know.  There's plenty of people but, you know -- I've been at the Times since 2004 we had about a thousand editorial employees and now we have about half that.  So it does have an impact especially when you get away from the four, five or six biggest papers then you see a real fall off because they don’t have the resources.  But then again, they use stories from the New York Times, the LA Times, other big papers.

Greg Dalton:  How about the New York Times?

Felicity Barringer:  Well, we've -- actually it was in the last three years, we created an entirely separate group of reporters devoted to environmental and energy coverage.  And so in that sense we went up by, I think, one -- all these people existed elsewhere in the paper and they were put together.  But we now have an editor who only works on these issues and she has a deputy.  So I would say we've kind of regularized coverage in a way across the paper because most things flow through this.  It doesn’t mean people who aren’t environment reporters on their business card don’t do environmental stories but it's a way to sort of look at the issues through, you know, through one lens and coordinate things throughout the paper.  But I think Marc is right, overall while the Times may have, you know, kind of set aside dedicated staff for this and have a dedicated editor for it, you're seeing less -- not just less reporters in papers across the country, but less face.  And that’s true to the Times too.  Our, you know -- much to the reporter’s consternation a few years ago, there was a space limit put on all page 1 stories that are not major projects.  It’s been adhered to mostly since then.  I have a piece out waiting that is maybe a little above the space limit buts that okay, every word is a gem.  But at the same time as that's been happening, you have the internet and you have blogs.  And we have two blog.  My colleague -- former colleague, Andrew Revkin is now at Pace University.  He’s still associated with the paper and puts -- and runs a blog called .earth.  And there was a blog that I contribute to called Green which takes in all these issues.  And that's where some of the slack gets taken up.  And you have a dedicated audience for those.

Greg Dalton:  And things that didn’t exist that I barely heard of a few years ago, Grist and all sorts of -- GigaOM and there are some various specialty things.  So it becomes, perhaps, more fragmented and specialized.  What are some of the sources you look to out there outside your own organizations that you respect, you think are doing good job covering these issues?

Marc Lifsher:  You mean in terms of journalism?

Greg Dalton:  Yeah.

Marc Lifsher:  Well, the New York Times and the Economist.

Greg Dalton:  Any of the sort of nontraditional, you know, print based organizations that are more web based, blogs, et cetera?

Marc Lifsher:  Well, I mean I look at the internet all the time and I usually don’t go to distinct environmental websites but it just floats out in various forms.

Felicity Barringer:  I'd say one, you know, traditional in that it's on paper but nontraditional in its style, High County News is terrific on these issues.  And I check in with Grist regularly but there's a whole host of other things, as you say, GigaOM.  There are -- I also -- I'd become a convert Twitter because it's a little bit like a wire service feeding new things.  If you are following interesting people and they are posting, you can get an advance warning.

Greg Dalton:  Very useful tool for reporters.  You mentioned the campaign against some scientists recently which is going on and made them push back in Virginia.  But there are still scientists are being harassed, they would say, by Freedom of Information Act.  Does that ever affect journalism, the skeptics or deniers ever have a chilling effect, “Well, if I write this I know I'm going to get flamed and get lots of hate mail”?  

Marc Lifsher:  Well, there's always a delete button.  You do get hate mail and you do get insulting and very personally insulting hate mail.  And I just delete them.

Felicity Barringer:  I mean it's, you know -- put it this way, whatever hate mail Marc and I make at or other environmental reporters, it's not a patch on what the reporters covering Israel.  So, you know, I mean it does rather go with the territories as a reporter but…

Greg Dalton:  It comes with the territory.

Felicity Barringer:  Yeah.  The other thing I would say just in terms of reaction, it's sort of a discipline.  If you know that somebody is going to come after you, first, on space, you've got cut down on words.  So you say, you know, “Sea level is expected to rise by such and such an amount.”  But you can hear on your shoulder somebody who’s emailed you before from an angry skeptical point of view saying, “Expected.”  You don’t give any sources.  So I will go and get the studies or one study in particular and I’ll link it to the word expected.  It doesn’t help the readers of the print paper much it does help the people who are reading online which is where a lot of commentary comes in.  “Okay.  If you don’t like me saying it's expected, here's the scientist who says why it's expected at some length.”

Greg Dalton:  But you're a non-scientist trying to evaluate the credibility of science.  I think it pretty complicated, right?  I mean you read the peer review articles and say, “Okay.  This is…”

Felicity Barringer:  Everybody’s got a backstop.  My backstop is the peer reviewers.  Yes, I recently had a post that came off, two peer reviewed articles that were out simultaneously in geophysical research letters.  And, you know, they're probably what would you say 15 or so really good journals.  Well, it's like going to the Los Angeles Times or my own newspaper or whatever.  You have an expectation that's what’s in these journals has been edited and has been looked at properly.  So given that expectation, it's not a problem to read, and then my cut is can I understand it or do I think -- if I can't understand it, do I think there's enough probability that is interesting to call the scientist and say, “What exactly did you mean here?”  

Greg Dalton:  And is there, what's called, sort of a balanced bias?  Sometimes people say that media has a bias to, well, that there's a consensus on climate science that they have to present.  Well, not everyone agrees with that consensus.  How do your papers deal with that?

Marc Lifsher:  It's basic journalism.  We have to try and put the other side.  If the other side is totally nonsensical and irrational, we may not include that.  But there's always, you know, someone who will express skepticism or have some thoughtful views.  I mean we have to put that in.  The thing is…

Greg Dalton:  Even if 97 scientists say, “We agree on certain…”

Marc Lifsher:  Well, we -- it's not a balance.  We don’t -- we don’t measure it but you can mention the context that there’s controversy and politics, that it's driving parts of the campaign, that candidates say this and say that.  What you have to remember is we’re journalist.  We’re lay people.  We may have developed some scintilla of expertise but we’re not scientists and we don’t -- and we’re not judges and we don’t come down with rulings.  We do the best job we can to gather and information in an impartial and not passionate but still interesting manner.  And we give it our best shot.  And if -- and then it's edited by editors who can hopefully improve and make it more fair and more readable.  And then it goes out there.  And if some people don’t like it, then, you know, what are you going to do, you know?

Greg Dalton:  Yeah, sure.

Marc Lifsher:  Maybe the next article they'll like it better, you know.

Greg Dalton:  Felicity Barringer.

Felicity Barringer:  I mean I think the first sort of accusations of what's now widely known as false balance.  Whereas you say 99 people say something or 97 people say something, but you've got to balance it with the other three, I think that's -- I think we’re well pass that.  But I've had accusations of false balance and I know that one of my colleagues, Elizabeth Rosenthal, was excoriated for writing in some depth about the fact of and the impact of the emails that were stolen from the University of East Anglia.  And they, you know, used some epithets about the climate skeptics and they generally acted like -- you know, the language was something that if you disagreed with the issue, you would fix on this language and saying these are a bunch of insiders doing things.  Well, let's say, for argument’s sake, that all of the East Anglia stuff was a side show and the journalists shouldn't have spent much attention with it.  It's the era of the internet.  That stuff was being covered like gang busters.

Greg Dalton:  Being covered as Climategate.  Some people might --

Felicity Barringer:  Yeah, yeah, Exactly.  Thank you.  Covered as Climategate.  It's not a…

Greg Dalton:  East Anglia.

Felicity Barringer:  It's not a word that I tend to go with so I was avoiding it, but that's absolutely right.  It comes by the name of Climategate.  

Well, okay, let's say two years down the road you get the election, or three years down the road you get the election you have now in which there's all these, you know, sort of acceptance of the idea that the scientists are somehow corrupt or something.  If no journalist from the mainstream media had covered what's known as Climategate, readers would have a very good point if they asked us, “Where did this come from?  How come you didn’t tell us people were thinking this way?”  We report on what's going on around us.  If we report on someone who denies that climate change is real, that doesn’t mean we’re accepting that, that means we’re telling our readers, “Look, there are people at here who think this way.”  Again, at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing I know there was some talk in newspapers that we had been totally out of touch.  The militia movement caught us by surprise.  It, therefore, caught our readers by surprise.  Well, we kind of think our readers shouldn't be surprised so we’re going to cover what's happening and if people want to call it false balance, be my guest.

Marc Lifsher:  And, you know, the enviros can share some of those same attributes.  I remember some time ago, it a wasn’t very big story but I was offered exclusive on a study that said California was way ahead in rooftop solar, we’re putting up more rooftop solar up than we thought we would.  And it was a real breakthrough.  And at the same time some other environmental group offered me another study.  And they had some economist that environmentalists didn’t like, who said, “Yeah, you know, solar is good and renewables are great.  We should do them.  But, you know, there's a lot of oil in California and there's a lot of natural gas onshore,” onshore, not even offshore, “And we ought to be getting that too and using them all.”  And afterwards the enviros were very upset with me.  And I said, “Well, you know, I got two studies so I threw them both out,” you know.

Greg Dalton:  Each side wants you to sort of see it their way, write about it their way, you know, write their narrative.

Marc Lifsher:  Yeah.

Greg Dalton:  We’re talking about climate and media coverage….

Marc Lifsher:  Keep in mind that the relationship between reporters and their sources, no matter who they are, whether they're enviros, they're oil companies or everyone else in every other beat, they’re very symbiotic and they can be very manipulative.  And so everyone, it's a marketplace and everyone is sort of looking for something.  And a reporter tries to balance it out but…

Greg Dalton:  Use you to achieve an end.

Marc Lifsher:  Totally, yeah, which is fine.

Felicity Barringer:  Yeah, I was going to say…

Greg Dalton:  You know that, yeah.

Felicity Barringer:  I mean we talked about it long ago.

Greg Dalton:  Yeah.  We’re talking about media and climate change with Felicity Barringer from the New York Time and Marc Lifsher from the Los Angeles Times.  I'm Greg Dalton.  We mentioned that Climategate scandal.  One companion story recently was Peter Gleick is an environmentalist who admitted recently that he did something similar and under false pretenses, obtain some information from a institute that's part of the climate skeptic camp.  Let's talk about that one, Felicity.

Felicity Barringer:  Yeah.  It was sort of bizarre for those of us who know and have worked with Peter Gleick.  It was -- when a colleague told me about it I did use the phrase, “I'm gobsmacked.”  I just could not -- it didn’t compute for me.  He's one…

Greg Dalton:  He's one of the most authoritative water experts in the world.  

Felicity Barringer:  Exactly.  I write a lot about water.  And he is an expert on a global scale.  He's recipient of MacArthur Genius Grant some couple of decades ago.  He founded the Pacific Institute that's based in Oakland.  It does, you know, ground breaking work on water, not so much original research, although some of that, but correlating what's out there and getting it out in accessible form.  This is invaluable service since water and fresh water access issues are only going to get more complicated with climate change.  So he takes -- you know, he gets, he says, a letter in the mail that has a document from a group in Chicago called the Heartland Institute.  And the Heartland Institute memo talks about program to get skeptic education in grades K through 12.  It talks about other things, you know, including -- that has some very provocative language like, “We want something…”  I'm going to get this slightly wrong but we -- “Maybe this will help science teacher stop teaching,” or something along those lines.  Any reporter would pull out and quote immediately.  So he says he was looking for a way to verify this.  And he posed as a board member of the Heartland Institute, set up an email account and called them and said, “Use this account to send me stuff,” and then requested specific stuff over time and then sent it out to a couple of blogs that made it all public including the memo that Heartland says was a fake.

Greg Dalton:  And this is a person who is head of a scientific ethics group at the American Geophysical Union?

Felicity Barringer:  He was.  He resigned that group the day -- no, he resigned that group about four days before he copped to having a -- post to somebody else.  He obtained these stuff under false pretenses.

Greg Dalton:  And now what's the impact, what's the follow up?  Marc Lifsher, anything in terms of his credibility or how is this being used as…

Marc Lifsher:  He's going to be damaged goods, you know.  I mean if we did something like that, we'd be fired immediately.  Yeah, he's damaged goods which is too bad, that sort of a human foible.  But the interesting thing is if you think global warning and climate is controversial, it's nothing compared to water.  I mean water in California for more than a hundred years has been the most controversial subject that exists.  I mean people, you know, they kill over water all the time.

Felicity Barringer:  And it's a major exception to what Marc said earlier about California being in the forefront on a lot of environmental things.  California has been one of the last states in the union to even think about asking farmers to -- well, anybody who’s got a well on the ground, to record how much they're pumping.  It's, you know, until three years ago or less, it was an anathema.  You couldn't say -- you couldn't even ask the whole agricultural industry to say how much ground water they were pumping.  Even while on the west side of the Central Valley, you have some of the greatest subsidence anywhere in the country as a result of decades of over pumping.

Marc Lifsher:  And salt.  Salt all over.   

Greg Dalton:  So California was like the pride itself on its environmental and clean energy leadership is a water laggard.

Marc Lifsher:  Well, I mean the problem here is we've got this giant state with 38 million people, at least two-thirds of it is basically in the middle of an arid zone to a complete desert.  And all the while -- most of the water comes from the north and has to go to south, so you have -- you have the world’s largest most productive farming industry in the world and tons of people.  And people from the north up here get totally upset that the south is stealing their water.  And, you know, it's an old -- it's an old saw you know, that Mark Twain said that, you know, “Whiskey is for drink and water is for fighting,” or something like that.  

Greg Dalton:  And that's going to get -- if the scientists are right -- I think I read recently that Sierra snow pack this year is about 25% of normal.  And if scientists are right, water stress in California is going to be more severe.

Marc Lifsher:  I don’t think -- what's happened this year is just one year.  I don’t think -- the reservoirs are still pretty much full from last year.  

Felicity Barringer:  Yeah.  I remember how much rain there was last year.

Marc Lifsher:  There's so much water.

Greg Dalton:  One year doesn’t make a trend but if the Sierra Snow pack is declining over the last 10, 20 years or so it's volatile year to year but there's a slow gradual trend -- I mean you cover water a lot.  Do you think water stress is going to be a key climate story?

Felicity Barringer:  I think water stress is a climate story.  I mean there are water managers in the country who can't, for reasons of the states that they work in, you know, can't really talk about climate change.  So I asked one of them, “What do you say?”  And he says, “Drought.”  This is, you know -- wherever -- I think you'll find the people who manage water on the east side of the state probably don’t vote Democratic very often but all of them will talk about the fact that there is gradually less snow pack, certainly the melt comes earlier.  The system -- the entire plumbing system on the state that supports these $30 billion agriculture economy was created for a different time.  And just as, you know, I hate to say it, but just as you grow older your shoes don’t fit quite as well and you suddenly change shoe sizes and stuff, this state has to change its plumbing configuration, you know.  And California is not alone.  A lot of states will have to do this.  The Colorado Rivers’ bounty has been going down.

Marc Lifsher: Which supplies Southern California as well.

Felicity Barringer:  Yeah.  Well, that also supplies Southern California.  So yes, I wanted to cover water in part because at a point when climate change becomes a kind of religious discussion and some of the rationality leeches out of it, water is never a religious discussion but it is often a very contentious one.

Marc Lifsher:  One thing I did learn in the one time I work for an East Coast newspaper and wrote about water out here is the editors sit in their windows and they look out at the Hudson and they say, “What problem with water?”  I mean they look out and they see that New Yorker famous cover and you talk about water and they just give you a complete blank stare, you know.

Greg Dalton:  Marc Lifsher is a reporter for the New York Times.  We’re also talking about climate change and the media with Felicity Barringer of the New York Time.  I'm Greg Dalton.  Let's talk about some positive stories.  One of the positive stories in California, clean energy-wise, has been solar, a lot of deployment of solar.  Which one of you would like to talk a little bit about that?  California also is losing its lead in solar as some of the other states are gaining market share.  Marc?

Marc Lifsher:  Well, just a quickly -- just kind of a go off track for a second.  I think the biggest success in California is energy efficiency.  The State Public Utilities Commission has a thing called the Loading Order which sets their priorities for how they will supply electricity to the state.  The first one, number one, is efficiency because every electron of electricity that you save is one you don’t have to make with whether it's solar investment or gas or coal or whatnot.  And the state has -- it's led the world in that.  You save so much electricity in 30 years that it's probably the equivalent of, you know, 25 or 30 basic power pants.  On solar is a slow, difficult process but I think they're starting to make some headway.  There' are a lot of approvals for these big desert solar centralized plants but they have a rough road ahead of them even after they've been fast track by the feds and the state.  There's all kinds of environmental pitfalls, financing pitfalls, economic pitfalls, getting the capital…

Felicity Barringer:  Transmission.

Marc Lifsher:  …and transmission, yeah.  I mean these places are on the desert.  And no one wants a power line near their house or in a beautiful vista, desert vista.  And there's no other way.  How do you get the electricity from there?  So it's a very difficult process.  

Felicity Barringer:  I think one of the things that has surprised me somewhat, both back in the reporting I've done on alternative energy there and here, is the fact that no matter how environmentally better, how much a particular power source is going to reduce carbon emission, reduce air particulates, reduce all the things that come with conventional power plants, there's going to be somebody who doesn’t want it wherever it's going to be placed that's why I used the word citing which is, you know, almost a dirty -- not a dirty word but a scary word among anybody who’s interested in energy because there's two kinds of -- well, three kinds of people.  The people who can rationally deal with this and accommodate it close to them.  The people who you all know the acronym NIMBY’s, not in my backyard.  And newer acronym which I've learned which is BANANA, build -- don’t build anything near any place -- it goes on like that.  I can't do it all.

Greg Dalton:  Nothing nowhere.

Felicity Barringer:  Exactly, nothing nowhere.  And also John Leshy who used to be solicitor general with the Interior Department said no -- an article I once covered and have repeated several times, “There's no square yard of earth in the United States that somebody doesn’t love.”  So that's what’s happening with these large scale solar plants, they take up an awful lot of space, they're in deserts and there are things like the desert tortoise.  And, you know, so you have a national branch of an environmental group like the Sierra Club saying, “We want solar.  We want wind.”  And you have the local branch of the Sierra Club saying, “Don’t hurt the desert tortoise.”  And it's, you know, it really does become a problem.  But California is got more rooftop solar, still not nearly enough but it has just under half the national share of rooftop solar as of 2010.  That's down as a proportion from two-thirds in 2008 but as a whole, it's all going up.  And states like New Jersey with a Republican governor -- New Jersey has made incredible strides in this area.  So as Marc said earlier, you know, with the exception of water, California really does provide -- it sort of lead the way.  And I'm sort of surprised that some of the other southwestern states are, you know, rank a whole lot lower than New Jersey.

Marc Lifsher:  And some of the solar stuff, a lot of these big projects, they will be built because we absolutely need them.  And California has a law that requires that one-third of all the electricity, both from the investors owned utilities and the municipal owned utilities like LA Department of Power and Water is going to have to come from renewable sources by 2020.  And the utilities are out signing contracts left and right.  And either they're going to have to declare failure or something’s got to give.

Greg Dalton:  Although they do get a little bit of leeway from the state, on missing their targets by…

Marc Lifsher:  They got leeway on the 2010.

Greg Dalton:  But not the later…

Marc Lifsher:  Well, we don’t know.  Let's wait until we get a little closer.  

Greg Dalton:  Yeah.  We are going to put a microphone up here and invite your participation.  And again, if you're on this side of the audience, please go through that door.  And the line starts with Jane Ann, our producer back there.  And welcome your one part question.  If you need help keeping it short, I'd be happy to help you.  And we’ll get going here in a minute.  While that's getting sorted I’ll just ask one more question.  Later this year California is going to start its own cap-and-trade program.  Nothing is happening with the United States nationally.  Several states have pulled back.  Where is this going to go?  What kind of impact is this going to have, California going ahead on cap-and-trade?  

Felicity Barringer:  Okay.  Well, I think, again, when the law was passed and signed by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2006 everybody -- not everybody but almost everybody envisioned it as the first step to a national program and it would eventually become subsumed in the national program.  Well, that was then.  Now I think it's in some ways like the -- I was worried about doing analogy on the fly but I'd say a little bit like the monks in the middle ages who kept copying the manuscripts from the classical era to show, you know, to keep the knowledge alive.  It shows that it can be done.  It’ll have some flaws that’ll give a sort of warning post.  It's a trial, I think.  And the fact that there is now an active ability to trade between California mission’s certificates when they go -- when they become real next year, and Quebec and that there are three other Canadian province, two or three, other Canadian provinces lined up, shows that this can go beyond a single state.  But is it going to available a major effect on greenhouse gasses?  Not really.

Marc Lifsher:  I mean even in theory as it's planned in the regulations by the ARB, if it works, it’ll provide maybe a fifth of the progress towards meeting the AB32 goal, there could be a lot of lawsuits, you know, manufacturers are going to claim that -- depending on how the money from the auctions from the sale of these things, how it's used, it could run afoul of Prop 13 and subsequent initiatives, and I know the manufacturers association is thinking about the legal implications and there could be lawsuits.

Greg Dalton:  Let's go to our first audience question here for Felicity Barringer and Marc Lifsher.  Yes.

Ethan Ravage:  Ethan Ravage with the International Emissions Trading Association, Eric Cantor over in -- with the IHT and Europe covers this, you know, fairly substantially with the European Union Emissions trading scheme.  Yes, you brought out a lot of issues with what's going to happen in California with its linkages to the trading schemes up in Quebec.  The other three I believe are Manitoba, British Columbia and not Saskatchewan but, you know, there's one…

Felicity Barringer:  In Ontario.

Ethan Ravage:  Yeah, Ontario.  So where did dialog go off track, do you think?  If you look back to 19 -- sorry -- if you look back to about 2007-2008 there were no fewer that about seven or eight different Senate bills in the U.S.  We actually had, you know, a recognition of the problem.  And now, as you said, it's become more of a religiosity issue.  And are we actually -- you know, instead of it being a solved issue, it's a political issue.  But nonetheless there's a lot that can be done to communicate.  Again, things like markets can be used to help bring a lot of the diverging groups together to create new investments and get us on a track towards a greener future.

Greg Dalton:  So you're question is where did we get off track?

Ethan Savage:  Yeah.  Where did we get off track?

Marc Lifsher:  Well, there is a political aspect which we’re seeing unfold in the campaign which is really off track.  And then there's economic issues that have always been around prior to AB 32 and in the debate that led to its passage and after.  The fact is manufacturers in California feel that they've been very pressed for a long time.  And manufacturing, they'll tell you it's a lot worse that it is but a lot of manufacturers fled to other states and overseas.  And they're already paying some of the highest electric rates in the country and they fear, simply, that cap-and-trade and renewables will drive those costs even higher.  And it's as simple as that.

Greg Dalton:  Some politics and the 2008 recession were part of what --?

Felicity Barringer:  Yeah.  No, I think the recession is a key thing to measure.  But, you know, where things went off track, there was the recession, there was Climategate but those who oppose cap-and-trade most fiercely tend to oppose all regulation.  You've heard the EPA demonized and I occasionally want to ask people, “Do you want the Cuyahoga River to burn all over again?”  I mean the EPA, you know -- do we want Los Angeles where you can now actually see the San Gabriel Mountains, you know, a good number of days a year as opposed to one week?  Do we really want to go back to that?  I don’t think so.  But they tied -- it was successfully tied cap-and-trade to regulation.  And frankly, the idea was that energy prices were supposed to go up if you emitted carbon.  Therefore, you know -- therefore, there was a certain amount of truth to the notion that Energy Board to the fear that energy prices might go up -- couple that with the recession and the sort of atavistic objection to government regulation. You put them altogether and I think it's a pretty toxic mix.  

Greg Dalton:  But it was also -- cap-and-trade was a Republican idea, market based -- of the options, it was the more market friendly option and it was killed by the proponents of free markets.

Marc Lifsher:  Well, because they moved, you know.  I mean, let's face it, Richard Nixon could never get elected Dogcatcher now.  And, you know, and he created all these stuff, the EPA and lots of these environmental laws, it was all Nixon, you know.  And, you know, he would be seen as a complete big government oppressor right now.

Greg Dalton:  A rhino.  They would call him a Republican name only these days.  Marc Lifshe is a reporter of the New York Times.  We’re also talking with Felicity Barringer from the New York Times.  Let's have our next audience question.

Male Speaker 1:  Many of the mainstream media articles about electric cars seem to be very negative and often are inaccurate.  Do you think that will change when reporters and editors actually drive electric cars themselves?

Felicity Barringer:  I’ll take a quick fire at that.  I'm not giving up my current Subaru Forester, which I love, but I committed to getting a plug-in hybrid for my next car.  I don’t quite know which -- where I'm going but I'm thinking of a Prius.  So that's for this reporter.  But I'm not sure that the coverage has been as negative as you say.  I’ll let Marc speak to that.

Marc Lifsher:  Well, if you look at -- I don’t think it's been negative in our paper.  First of all, the hybrids we have now have been well received.  And I'm sure lots of journalists as well as lots of just regular people drive them.  And the new cars that are coming to market seemed to be -- they're getting fairly good reviews.  I haven't seen that.  You know, some people are concerned.  There are a lot of problems that have to be worked with electric cars: the distance that they can travel and charging them up and if you don’t have a garage, you know, how you're going to charge it up.  You can have a wire coming out of your house and going out to the streets, you know.  But they're coming, that's for sure.

Greg Dalton:  I'm not a reporter but I do own an electric car and I love it, the Nissan Leaf.  It's fast, it's zippy, it's clean.  No, not for that, but just that that they are out there.  I'd give either of you a ride anytime within 50 miles so I can get back home.  There is that.  It is a little odd to go, say, to a friend in Menlo Park.  I'd like to come over for dinner and I'd like to eat and I also would like to plug into your wall outlet so I could get some electricity or, otherwise, I’ll never leave.  I can't get home.  Let's have our next audience question.

Male Speaker 2:  Gary Latchall, I’ll describe myself as a retired physicist.  What I feel is under-reported is the global warming potential of a lot of these things, particular the Keystone pipe because the sand stone takes a lot of energy to extract and even the fracking and the natural gas because natural gas leakage can more than offset its advantages over coal.  

Greg Dalton:  So life cycle analysis.

Felicity Barringer:  Yeah.  I think that life cycle analysis -- you raised an excellent point.  I talked about gas leaking from, you know, which is where Gasland gets its pictures of the sinks going on fire, sinks full of water.  I think -- or taps going on fire.  But I think life cycle analysis is going to be kind of crucial to really looking at what is the benefit or cost of a fuel.  I do think that it's in the natural gas industry’s interest to stop the leakage so they can then sell what doesn’t leak.  But yes, the methane which is natural gasses are far more potent than greenhouse gasses and carbon dioxide.  And that is a really significant issue leakage.

Greg Dalton:  And the life cycle of tar sands?

Marc Lifsher:  Well, I mean they use a lot of energy.  I mean I used to work in Venezuela and they have oil down by the Orinoco River which the consistency is asphalt.  And they didn't use it for years and years and years but then American and foreign oil companies came and they found a way to crack it so it could be made into light sweet crude.  And they actually now have bigger reserves in Venezuela than Saudi Arabia.  So that's a pretty hard thing with all your life cycle.  It's pretty hard to make the argument that it shouldn't be used, you know.  Someone’s going to want to commercialize that.  

Greg Dalton:  There's a lot of demand energy demand out there.  Yes, sir.  Next audience question.

Angelo Festa:  Yes.  My name is Angelo Festa.  I'm a San Francisco resident.  I drove a Prius for 11 years.  And even with the gas savings I got sick and tired of shelling out $50 to fill it up so I became a Leaf owner a year ago.  I haven't seen a gas station.  And yeah, I don’t care what the price of gas is.  I have solar collectors on my roof.  So essentially I'm taking the sun’s energy and putting it into my car.

Greg Dalton:  Now, do you want to buy one for them or no?

Angelo Festa:  I'd give you a ride just like you.  But here's something that really irks me.  Within the last ten days a major breakthrough has hit the news on the internet but I couldn't find it in the newspapers.  Stop me if I'm wrong.  And here's what happened: a small company over in Newark came up with a battery system that delivers ten times the energy density of what we have now in on Leafs.  So think of it.  The bottom line is you'll be able to drive your Leaf or a Coda or whatever electric car you have ten times further.

Greg Dalton:  But it didn’t get covered.  I saw the story in the San Jose Mercury News.  I don’t know about the Times, either of the Times.

Marc Lifsher:  I haven't seen it.

Felicity Barringer:  I would just caution you.  There are a lot of developments on small scale that can't be build up on a large scale.  And it's great -- look, if they can do this, if they honestly could get six times, eight times, ten times the density and not have it burn up and not have it way so much that it, you know, that you can't get over 35 or whatever, I think there are eight different parameters that batteries are measured on and obviously, energy density is a crucial one but it's not the only one and gaining on energy density may lose you on some of other parameters.  So what I'd be interested in is not so much have they build it in one factory or they built ten batteries, but is this something that can be build up to scale?  Now, question of when you cover something, as Marc said in the beginning, is a little idiosyncratic, that doesn’t mean necessarily it shouldn't be covered but I would be a little cautious.  That's all.  Marc, you cover this area more than I do.

Marc Lifsher:  Yeah.  Well, I don’t know anything about that.

Greg Dalton:  But there's lots of promising technologies.

Marc Lifsher:  Sure.

Greg Dalton:  Some of which makes it to market and scale.  A lot of it is sort of fails in the valley.

Marc Lifsher:  Which does bring me to one point.  Sir, you were talking about Newark, California.  Is that right?

Greg Dalton:  Yeah, it was here in California.

Marc Lifsher:  Well, I brought a clip down that was in our paper.  And earlier this year it was reported that like 40% of all the venture capital in the United States that went to energy or global warming or anything along those lines, came to California.  So it's showing up in companies like that and small companies all around Northern California, I imagine principally.  And, you know, this is the laboratory of the world.  So when you hear about all these jobs going overseas and et cetera, et cetera, a lot of them are being replaced by really important work here in California.

Greg Dalton:  Let's have our next audience question.

Lori Sinsley:  Hi, Marc and Felicity and Greg.  Thank you for being here and thank you for all of your great work.  Lori Sinsley with Environmental Defense Fund.  Going back to your comments about how the media is covering climate change, the toxic term, whatever it is they say.  I think that there is a really important part for the media to play educating the public.  And I think that the balance is something that confuses them.  They're like, “Well, so and so said this.”  And they don’t know what to believe.  I think the majority of Americans don’t so I just kind of want to point that out.  And I'm not saying we, of course, love your papers.  But what role do you see the media play in like pointing out how extreme weather events and, you know, Americans sort of like increasing belief that the climate is changing?  How is that going to affect your media coverage?

Marc Lifsher:  You know, what we do is not so mysterious or intellectual.  We’re journalists and we’re basically charged with getting good stories that people are going to read all the way to the end or close to that, and they’ll turn it to their wife and it's a cliche, it's a, “Hey, Martha, did you see this?”  That's what we do.  We’re not -- so when there are good stories, we go out and we tell them to the best of our ability.  And if it's about the environment, we’re looking for something new, something that is -- hasn’t come out before, something that's maybe contradictory to the established line of thought, and something that people read and make our bosses happy and get a lot of hits on the internet and hopefully keep from selling fewer and fewer newspapers.  So we’re just looking for good stories.  And sometimes they're about the environment and various aspects of that, then there are about other things as well.

Felicity Barringer:  And the other thing is, for better or worse, I think our environmental coverage needs to science based.  And sadly, there was -- well, not sadly, just there was study in recent issue of geophysical research letters, one of the journalists I go to, saying that it's not going to be -- to be able to say this weather event is worse because of climate change, it's -- the article said temperatures will have to rise about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit from where they were in the early 20th century before you can tease out of the sort of noise and background variability in whether an event is an actual relation to climate change.  So the impact is going to be visible before us long before scientists will be able to say with certitude, “That was climate change that did that.”

Greg Dalton:  That's very interesting.  We’re getting towards the end.  Let's have our last audience question.  Yes, sir.

Male Speaker 3:  You've kind of talked about the current situation, politically, toxic and so forth.  So my question is, as observer of society, what do you think is going to potentially change the track that we’re on, perhaps, move as more towards a consensus?  Are we talking some of visible environmental catastrophe?  Are we talking about change and our economic situation and the return of the good times?  You know, I'm just curious as to what you think might inflect the current path we’re on and move towards, perhaps, a more consensus situation?

Marc Lifsher:  I think strictly in the California level, there have been two big changes that most people aren’t aware of.  They're kind of technical that will make a difference.  One is that the voters a couple of years ago ordered up that the drawing of the lines, redistricting for legislative and congressional seats should be done by an independent citizens panel.  And in fact this is the first time it’s been done and it’ll be in effect in November.  What that's going to do is in the past the legislature itself is always gerrymandered the state creating a majority of safe seats for Democrats because there are more Democrats, but minority of equally saved seats for Republicans.  So what you got is the most liberal Democrats in most of the Democratic seats and the most conservative Republicans in the Republican seats.  And because the state, until recently, needed two-thirds vote pass the budget and you still needed two-thirds vote to raise taxes, it created a hardening of all the positions in the gridlock.  Now that is going to change after the election in November.  The other thing is we've gone through a primary system that instead of the highest number of votes for the Democrat and the highest number of votes for the Republican, we've got the top two no matter what party they be in.  So you -- the idea, and I think will happen, is it will push the eventual office holders from the extremes to the middle and it’ll happen on the state level.  But also we have, I think, 50 person congressional or 52 person congressional delegation, it will have that effect there.  And I think those are very, very, very relative glance on positive changes happen in California.

Greg Dalton:  Felicity Barringer, last word?

Felicity Barringer:  I would just add briefly.  I'm afraid you’re right.  I think we can't underestimate the impact of Katrina on people’s thinking about climate change in the 2006-2007 period.  Katrina was 2005.  And, you know, big weather events get people’s attention.  And that's, you know, the nature of who we are.  The threat has to kind of be, you know, in front of and visible before we really respond.

Greg Dalton:  One big weather event, last year, was it Snowtober, hit the media.  Editors have informally been one of them on the upper west side of Manhattan.  I think after it hit home literally for some of the media people in New York, you started to see more stories.  ABC News in particular had pretty good stories that can be attributed to climate change or not.  It woke some people up.  That's all the time we have.  Thank you all for coming.  I'd like to thanks Marc Lifsher with the New York Times…

Marc Lifsher:  LA Times.

Greg Dalton:  Marc Lifsher with the -- we’re not doing job trading here.  Marc Lifsher with the Los Angeles Times and Felicity Barringer: with New York Times.  I'm Greg Dalton.  Thank you all for coming to Climate One today.

[Applause]

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