Former President Bill Clinton and Ted Turner Discuss the Future of Energy Policy (Transcript)
American Museum of Natural History, New York
Former President William J. Clinton presented Ted Turner with the 2005 DLC Clinton Award for Leadership and National Service at a DLC event at the American Museum of Natural History on June 29, 2005. President Clinton and Ted Turner engaged in an in-depth discussion of energy and environmental issues, moderated by UN Foundation President, former Senator Timothy E. Wirth.
Al From: Good afternoon. I'm Al From, founder and CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council. Welcome to this very special forum of the DLC Clinton Center in this really spectacular room. I think this is going to be a whale of an event.
The DLC Clinton Center was established in 2002 to honor the accomplishments and legacy of President Bill Clinton. Central to that legacy is the epic of service. In a few minutes, President Clinton will present the 2005 Clinton Center Award for Leadership and National Service to Ted Turner. We honor Mr. Turner today for his service to our nation and indeed to the entire globe. Ted Turner is a media visionary, a philanthropist, and perhaps most importantly, an environmentalist. His commitment of time, energy and financial resources toward preserving the earth and improving the quality of natural systems that sustain us is unmatched.
But before this award is presented, we will be treated to a discussion with the president and Mr. Turner, moderated by former Senator Tim Wirth. This forum is about the future, about big ideas that can transform it. It is about innovation, how clean energy technology can change our economic, our environmental and our security future. It is especially appropriate that this forum about the next big idea takes place in the 20th anniversary year of the Democratic Leadership Council, for the DLC has always been about big paradigm-breaking ideas. The mission of the DLC is to drive modernization in the Democratic Party and in the American body politic. We believe the best way to do that is to pursue new and innovative ways to further the first principles of our party: security, opportunity, responsibility and reform. The ideas President Clinton and Mr. Turner will discuss will do just that.
At the DLC we're proud of our successes in our first 20 years: the ideas we have injected into the political debate that have changed our country, and the great success of DLC political leaders like President Clinton and Senator Wirth, that stretches from the courthouse to the statehouse to the White House. But as much as we cherish our successes of the past, we are firmly focused on the future and on doing our part to return progressive leadership to our land. That is why the DLC is entering a new phase. During the next 18 months, the efforts of the DLC and its companion think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, will be focused on meeting four great challenges facing our nation: keeping America safe, building an opportunity society, standing up for family and responsibility, and reforming a broken political system to restore our democracy. Understanding the relationship between energy policy and security and economic empowerment and climate change, topics that will be discussed this afternoon, will have an enormous impact on our ability to meet those challenges.
We're privileged to have President Clinton with us. President Clinton, more than any other single person, has defined the New Democrat philosophy. I believe one of his most important legacies is modernizing progressive politics not only in America but throughout the whole democratic world. I like to think that some of the work we did during his chairmanship of the DLC in 1990 and 1991 contributed to that legacy.
President Clinton's presidency was extraordinarily successful for our country, creating 22.5 million new jobs, increasing incomes, moving millions from welfare to work, and reducing crime and teen pregnancy. His administration brought unprecedented gains to minorities and women, had the best environmental record since President Theodore Roosevelt, moved a hundred times more people out of poverty than Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and restored the ethic of citizen service to our nation. That's quite a record, and he achieved it the New Democrat way, honoring the first principles of the Democratic Party by coming up with new ideas for furthering them that meet the challenges of our time. The president has continued his good works in his post-presidency, where he has made a major focus of his efforts the strengthening of the capacity of people here in the United States and throughout the world to meet the challenges of global interdependence.
I'm particularly pleased that my longtime friend Senator Tim Wirth will moderate this discussion. You all know Tim for his many years of public service: five terms in the House of Representatives and a senator from Colorado, and was the first undersecretary of state for Global Affairs in the Clinton administration. Tim now serves as president of the United Nations Foundation, which works tirelessly to promote peace and prosperity around the globe. But many of you may not know the important role Tim Wirth played in the birth of the New Democrat movement. After the 1980 election, at Tim's impetus, we began an effort in the House Democratic Caucus to modernize the thinking of our party. I was the executive director of the caucus at the time under the leadership of the late Congressman Gillis Long of Louisiana. With Gillis's blessing and Tim's leadership, we created a taskforce on long-term economic policy. The product of that effort, a report called "Rebuilding the Road to Opportunity," was the New Democrat movement's first policy paper, and it still adorns the wall above my desk. In 1985, the efforts that Tim began in the caucus were morphed into the DLC. So I can honestly say, without Tim Wirth's pioneering work we may not have been here today.
It is now my great pleasure to turn the program over to my friend, Tim Wirth.
Former Sen. Tim Wirth: Al, thank you very much. And from all of us in the room, Al, congratulations to you and the DLC for 20 years of a great contribution, and we're all very pleased to be here at the end of one phase and the beginning of another.
Some months ago Al and I had lunch together, and among other topics we talked about the remarkable people that we had had the opportunity to work with and work for. President Clinton and Ted Turner, thinking about people of just extraordinary vision, that capacity to kind of look over the horizon and reorder reality in a bit of a different way, and to do so with an extraordinary love of life and passion for the earth. It was out of that conversation at lunchtime, we said, well, wonder if the two of them have ever spent time together on a panel, and maybe we could occasion that to happen. So we began to explore the idea, and out of that came today's luncheon and today's panel discussion.
Al and I, independently and together, have heard both President Clinton and Ted Turner talk about energy and energy as a transformational opportunity for the country. For too long, too many people have looked at energy either as a dull and anesthetizing issue or one in which, like ANWAR and CAFE, you rev up the public policy engine and you drive it right into a brick wall as fast as possible. It gets destroyed, nothing happens and you wait a couple of years and go through the same exercise.
Well, energy now has changed, and the world tells us how energy has changed: $60 a barrel for oil and a dependency and international competition that is unlike anything we've ever seen before; dependence on the most volatile, politically difficult area in the world, the Middle East, for a great deal of the world' resources; third, a direct relationship between energy, the production of carbon and climate change, climate being clearly the world's most pressing environmental crisis on which there is now almost complete consensus about the urgency for action; and the final element of energy that is so interesting is the issue of poverty. More than half the people on the face of this globe have almost no chance in their lives whatsoever without access to electricity. And the development process, as the secretary general has so clearly pointed out, has to clearly articulate and engage energy and access to electricity as a core principle and a core policy for what we do.
So if we think about national security, we think about crisis of climate and poverty, energy is the enveloping issue and energy is the opportunity that we think about. So that brings us here today.
The role that I'm going to play is just simply to put out a question or two and let it run. We'll go for a while and see how it goes, and maybe have a little bit of time for questions, maybe not.
But, Mr. President, if we might begin with you, and maybe you could give us your read. You have had a great deal of time and experience in the public policy realm, looking at energy as an issue, and maybe you could talk a little bit about why you think energy has been so hard to crack; why has it been so difficult to transform energy as an issue into one that really engages the political process and leads to the kind of change that say a DLC is organized to move?
President Bill Clinton: I think there are two reasons. One is until recently climate change remained at kind of a distant threat to most people. When Al Gore wrote "Earth in the Balance" in 1992, he wound up being dubbed "the ozone man" in the 1992 campaign. People thought it was a kooky deal -- everybody but me. I thought it was right. The second thing is oil's been cheap; too cheap, and whenever it got high it got cheap again before we could reorganize ourselves to develop an alternative way of pursuing the future. The third is, frankly, that before Ted Turner and a few people like him got into it, most people thought anyone who was serious about building a energy future out of energy conservation and clean energy was sort of a peripheral person on society's edges and slightly kooky.
I began to work in 1977 with Amory Lovins trying to stop the building of the Grand Gulf nuclear plant in Arkansas, and people looked at me like I had slipped a gasket, you know, that I'd spent too much time in universities and I didn't know what I was doing. Well, a couple of years ago I was out in Colorado, and Amory Lovins lives in his own home now in Colorado and he never pays an electric bill because he produces more energy in his home than he consumes, and the electric company has to buy it back for him under the legislation passed when President Carter was in office requiring utilities to purchase that.
So I think those are the three reasons it hasn't happened. And fourthly, the old energy economy, rooted in oil and coal is very well organized, as you know, highly hierarchical, very well politically connected and very well financed, and at critical junctures tied to both the automobile producers and the autoworker's union, which has given us a bipartisan consensus in Congress against raising CAFE standards -- I think a wrong consensus. The new energy economy, which has been out there with real evidence every since the first oil crisis in the '70s, remains essentially disorganized, entrepreneurial, and under-capitalized, so that people can always pooh-pooh it. But for example, people say wind energy is not economical. There are now long-term wind contracts being signed at 3 cents per kilowatt hour, and the price drops 15 percent every time capacity doubles, and capacity is increasing at 30 percent a year. People say solar energy is not economical but the price drops 20 percent every time capacity doubles, and solar energy is increasing globally at 30 percent a year. I put over 300 solar reflectors in the top of my library and we'll pay them off in a year and a half, after which it'll be pure profit from then on, and we have cut the energy usage of the Clinton Center library by 34 percent with the solar panels and a few other conservation measures.
So that's basically why we haven't been able to do it. I think now there's more awareness of global warming, there's more willingness to look at alternatives. You've got Republicans as well as Democrats dealing with this, you've got oil at $60 a barrel, and I think at least if you look at the energy bill passed by the Senate yesterday, it's not exactly a prize but there is a pony in there somewhere. I mean, 40 percent of their tax subsidies are for pursuing alternative energy sources. So it shows, they defeated decisively an attempt to raise CAFE standards but they did go into the alternative energy source area pretty clearly. So I think we're maybe 30 years after we should have started working on this, after the organization of OPEC in '71 and the first oil price crisis, we may be finally willing to build a new energy future.
And by the way, keep in mind the title of this event is "Transforming America's Economy." It is the single most significant opportunity we have to create a new generation of high-wage jobs, something we have not done in this decade that we did in the last decade with information technology. We haven't found a substitute in this decade. It's in clean energy.
Sen. Wirth: Well, that gets us right to the core of the topic, the single best opportunity that we have for transforming the economy and creating high-wage jobs. Probably nobody in our generation has done more thinking about the future and helping to transform the economy than Ted Turner, working in the communications electronics world, and that remarkable change that came about the last 30 years of the 20th century.
Ted, would you talk a little bit about how there is there a parallelism between what happened in the last 30 years in the electronics, telecommunications, digital world, between that and the current opportunities in energy? How do you look at this? You've also said about the transformative opportunities of energy and maybe you could talk a little bit about your own thinking about that.
Ted Turner: Well, I really need to start with a little bit of background, how I got interested. Back when I was planning CNN, I did a lot of thinking about what CNN was going to be, what it was going to stand for, what I was going to try and accomplish with it, and I obviously wanted it to be of benefit to humanity. But during that time I covered a lot of other issues -- the Cold War and the population explosion, the destruction of the environment, and the energy situation -- and I remember very vividly when the oil boycott of the '80s occurred when President Carter was president, and I studied that carefully and right then and there I said, we are too vulnerable to the Middle East oil supplies. And this was long before global warming was even on the horizon as an issue. Clean air and clean water certainly were.
I was driving a Cadillac and I went down to the auto dealership and I traded my Cadillac -- it was in the '70s -- I traded it in for a Toyota, and I've driven a small car ever since. And I started going around cutting out the excess lights in my house, and I tried my dead-level best to live without air conditioning, and just personally began an energy conservation routine in my own life. And I tried to convince others too, and it was very, very difficult. And now I find my country and my world, but particularly my country, sitting here, our automobile industry is in grave jeopardy because they've gone out and geared up to build these big, gigantic SUVs and pickup trucks that are so fuel inefficient; here we've got this rapid rise in oil prices that are going to make those cars extremely difficult to sell.
The American automobile industry will have a difficult time surviving this transition, and it's going to be a very difficult time for our country too because we did not heed the warnings of the past and make preparations for this coming. Our automobiles should be half the size that they are now. I've had a hybrid now for three years, obviously, and I probably get 50 miles to the gallon, when I drive, but I also live above my office so I don't have to drive to work. I don't have a commute; I just walk down one flight of stairs to get to work. I just don't want to waste the time being in traffic and waste the fuel.
But there are three important reasons, overwhelming reasons, why we should move to new, clean, renewable, locally produced energy. The first two have already been mentioned, the one about the environment, but it can be at third place. It doesn't really matter in what order they are because they're all extremely important. The environment -- we've got to stop burning fossil fuels because of climate change.
But perhaps even more important is security -- financial security for the United States. The amount of transfer of our wealth to the other side of the world over oil has already amounted to like $5 or $6 trillion. We would not have any national debt today if we had not been, over the last 30 years, importing all this oil. And on top of that, it's more expensive than ever now, and the transfer of our wealth is so gigantic that we can't really afford it. Our capital is being transferred to the other side of the world. God knows that will be done with that money. I mean, it could be used to build nuclear arsenals to threaten us militarily.
And the third is our national security. What if we face another boycott when over 60 percent of our energy comes from overseas? What if we are boycotted? Basically the United States right now is so dependent on oil, our economy and our nation will be completely shut down. So we have got to get out of this situation, and what we have to do -- and I really believe it will be the biggest economic project in the history of mankind -- will be the changeover from a fossil fuel economy. And remember, we've already made this transition once. There was time when we were about 100 percent dependent on coal about a hundred years ago, and we, in a reasonably quick period of time changed over to oil and gas from purely meeting our energy needs by coal. And it will not be difficult -- the technology to do it already exists. It can be refined and advanced, but we have enough new technologies between wind, solar, biofuels and even safer and better ways of disposing of emissions that need to be very carefully explored like the injection of the emissions into the deep caverns in the ground where they would not get into the atmosphere.
But with this transition will come new jobs, millions of new jobs. If I were running the country, I would put this as our top priority, our top priority, and put all of our resources behind it; take away the subsidies for the fossil fuel industry and give those subsides -- at least until we get this new clean energy program underway it should be like the way we scaled up for World War II. On December 6th, 1941 we were building automobiles. The next day we stopped building automobiles and we started building tanks and aircraft and ships, and we totally mobilized for World War II. We should mobilize for this. It's as great a threat to us, in my opinion, as we faced in World War II, and the economic benefits will be gigantic because the money will be spent here, and there is no reason why the United States, in a very short period of time, should not recapture the technological lead in clean energy technologies so that that will help our high-tech sector.
We can turn this from a potential looming disaster into the greatest success story this nation has ever seen, and all we have to do is change course. If we were driving the ship of state we'd call down to the engine room and say, hard right rudder, and change course quickly and dramatically. And we will see an era of prosperity like this world has never seen before, and it will be all over the world because most of the nations don't have oil and they'll need to deploy these new clean energy, locally produced energy sources too, and we can really have a really, really prosperous and happy future if we take the right actions.
President Clinton: I agree. That's great. Thank you. I just wanted to make two points when you think about this, to support what Ted said. First of all, quite apart from the economic challenge we have two distinct problems here. Global warming is caused by the emission of greenhouse gasses that are in oil and coal, and anything else that emits greenhouse gasses. So to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions we have to take on the way we use oil and coal. Our reliance on foreign oil is almost entirely -- not entirely but almost entirely -- confined to the transportation sector. So if we want to become more independent of foreign oil and reduce that contribution to greenhouse gasses and reduce our reliance on it, we've got to do what Ted said; we've got to be serious about transportation.
But the economic benefits go way beyond transportation. And that brings me to the second point I want to make. There is a lot of talk today, and if you look at this energy bill there's some significant subsidies in here for the development of wind power, for example, and biomass, because a lot of farmers are interested in that. It's their political constituencies around that. There is still almost no serious discussion of the role that energy conservation could have in this, and that's still the cheapest, easiest and most painless way. Most people think about energy conservation the way when I was a kid we thought about gulping castor oil, you know, that we've got to freeze in the winter and sweat in the summer. That's not true.
Let me give you an example. When we did the Kyoto Treaty, everybody said, even recently, oh, well, Clinton went off on a wild goose chase and those targets weren't realistic and all that sort of stuff. Dupont reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 65 percent and saved about $1.5 billion over three years. And let me just point something out. After the first oil price -- you know this because you helped engineer it -- but after the first oil price spike and the crisis of the '70s, we became twice as efficient as we were. Today we are twice as efficient as we were. The energy conservation measures we put in place when I was in the White House, in the Greening of the White House Initiative, amounted to taking 700,000 cars a year off the roads in America. That was just a drop in the barrel because it wasn't accompanied by a national strategy, but it just shows you what we can do.
Now, let me just say, if you just take electricity alone we could cut half of the greenhouse gases emitted by electricity generation, only a tiny bit of which is still with oil now -- it's mostly in other stuff, mostly coal, but let me just talk about that -- most electric generators still waste half the source power. They're 50 percent inefficient. Most industrial motors are very inefficient. Most household appliances are still inefficient; the Energy Department has a whole process for recognizing those that aren't. And most people still use old-fashioned lighting when compact fluorescent lighting lasts 10 times as long and it uses a third less energy and costs roughly twice as much. So if you pay twice as much you get a third less energy for something that lasts 10 times as long, and yet there are no incentives in this bill and we haven't given any thought of how to get society systematically to do this. So we just depend on clever businesspeople and apartment house to figure out that this is a bird's nest on the ground out there. So I just wanted to make those two points.
I think we have way underemphasized conservation, and it's important not to mix apples and oranges. We should do both -- being more independent of foreign oil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions -- but they require slightly different strategies if you want to accomplish both at the same time.
Sen. Wirth: Well, let me push you both a little bit on how do you get from here to there? Ted talks about this as the number-one priority -- if you were president, this would be your number-one issue. And, Mr. President, you said that there are no incentives now systemically built into the system. If you look at this last November, here we had a situation in the country with 160,000 troops in the Gulf, almost complete scientific consensus on climate change, a much better understanding of global poverty and its roots, and yet in four national debates, three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate, the issues of energy, climate change, poverty were not raised by any of the moderators one time. I mean, this, it seems to me, is some kind of an enormous political failure, or something else is happening. Maybe we're all wrong.
Mr. President, if you were trying to move this issue, say if you were advising a new administration, what would you say to them to do to break into this cycle where it is so hard to get that debate going?
President Clinton: Well, first of all, I gave a speech at the National Geographic -- I gave two major speeches on this and they elicited giant yawns in the press. I mean, it was a yawner. I thought they were pretty interesting speeches myself, but they were, you know...
Well, let's take a cue from somebody that's not of like mind on the energy policy: George Bush. So he wants to go and get support for his Iraq policy, right? So how does he couch the Iraq policy? Well, everybody knows what we've got to do there. What we've got to do is make the government genuinely representative and we've got to train enough police officers and military people, security personnel to defend the country. That's the only way we're going to get out of there with anything that looks like a victory and a successful life for the Iraqi people.
That's not what he primarily talked about. What did he primarily talk about? He was there fighting terrorism. It wasn't a center of terrorism before Saddam fell; he kept the terrorists out, but the president recognized that terrorism had a greater appeal. Ted Turner just gave us the arguments: you want to argue that we don't want to be dependent on foreign powers that may use our money to fund terrorists, or otherwise undermine this country, and you want America to be strong and create a new range of American jobs that will be good middle-class jobs with healthcare and retirement and all those things that people don't have now. Take the things people are worried about that will honestly flow -- we don't have to lie about this; they will honestly flow from these policies -- and make those the arguments for changing the policies and then say, oh, by the way, we can also reduce poverty, we can also reduce global warming.
The American people are progressive by two-to-one, three-to-one on all these other issues, but they're not voting issues for them. That's why this stuff never flies. There's a difference in having an opinion on an issue and having it be a voting issue, and the Democrats keep finding that out in every election. We're going to keep finding it out till we win some of these security debates. But I don't want to get off on that.
The point is the arguments we need to make for Congress and the country have to be the voting issue arguments, not just the ones we win in a Pew research poll. And I don't mean I don't love the Pew research organization, but winning an argument in a poll doesn't amount to anything if the argument you want is not a voting issue. So that's my belief.
Sen. Wirth: Ted?
Mr. Turner: Well, one of the problems with our form of government -- and really, it's a flaw in ourselves -- is that we're not real good at dealing with problems that are way off in the future. We're real good with dealing -- as soon as 9/11 happened, I mean, we had the Department of Homeland Security and everybody is running around trying to see that it doesn't happen again, but we really didn't have any before 9/11; we had no plan to protect our cities from this type of hijacking and crashing those planes. We had a half an hour notice that those planes had gone off course and were headed for New York and Washington. We knew that, but we didn't have any fighter planes ready to go up and intercept them. Nine-eleven could have been avoided if we had taken precautions in advance.
And this energy thing, like our crumbling infrastructure, since it's pretty much out of sight, like the grid -- the problems we had with the blackout and the grid -- the grid is kind of out of sight and it would take a lot of money, it would take a fair amount of time to replace it, so nobody does; we just let it go. And that's basically what we've done with our energy policy. We've let it go. And now the chickens are coming home to roost. Now it is becoming a problem with $60-a-barrel oil, and god knows, will it go to a hundred, because it could -- if it goes to a hundred it could seriously impact our economy. It could throw it off course.
But I, as a futurist -- you know, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what's happening in the future. For instance, I looked at the United Nations. The United Nations five years ago was almost in danger of collapse because it was broke. The United States was counting on peacekeeping -- it was over $2 billion in arrears; we weren't paying our bills. And that was one reason that I wanted to call attention to the fact that the U.N. needed to be gotten back on track and that's why I gave that billion dollars. I do something about it.
But it's extremely difficult and frustrating and disappointing because if humanity can't develop a longer timeline looking into the future as things get more and more complex -- as they have today -- we cannot just be monkeys with nuclear weapons. We have to be human beings, intelligent, educated, forward-thinking, and I'd like to add kindhearted human beings, if we're going to survive; because at the rate we're going we are not properly preparing for the future. We're not thinking about it, we're not taking actions to prepare for it, and we do so at our peril.
Sen. Wirth: Let me press a little bit more on two speeches at the geographic -- you know, the tree feel and nobody heard it fall in the forest -- four debates never raised. Give us a tutorial, Mr. President, on how you advance an issue like that. If you're advising Al From and the Democratic Leadership Council, their new commitments for the next generation of thinking, how do you take this issue and move it? What are the ingredients that are going to take and move this issue? What kind of political organization and persistence? How do you engage the press? And if you were strategizing on this, what do you say to Al and the DLC? What do you say to Ted Turner's Energy Future Coalition that's trying to move this issue?
President Clinton: Well, first of all, if you look at all the surveys, we know that the only reason that the Republicans can maintain a majority support in the country is that people thought they were good on terrorism and national security. So we have to say that, first, this is the national security issue for America's future.
The second thing we know is that Americans are worried about the off-sourcing of jobs to China and India. They're worried about the hollowing out of the middle class, they're worried about losing their healthcare and their retirement. We have to say that unless we want to become a protectionist poorer country, in every decade we have to find a new source of high-wage jobs and growth industries, and we have wasted half of this decade with the most self-evident source of new high-wage jobs that will create a lot of new people in the middle class, reduce poverty, and create jobs in literally every single community in America.
You know what, it's no accident you've got 131 mayors, from liberal Democrats to conservative Republicans, saying they're going to meet the Kyoto climate change goals in their communities, whether the nation does anything about it or not. This conservative Republican mayor from Nebraska was great -- quoted in the newspaper the other day -- said, I love President Bush; I support him in Iraq, I support everything he does, but I'm a farmer. He said we had to go to Iraq because of the principle of precaution. There is no place in the public debate where the principle of precaution applies more than with climate change. I want my grandkids to be able to farm this land in Nebraska and I, by god, going to meet these targets. That was a stunning thing.
So you start with the security issue, then you go to the economic issue, then you go to the environmental issues and the other things. And there is a broad support in America now -- President Bush wants to do it more unilaterally than I would -- but there's a lot of strength in the Republican Party now for doing something about poverty and AIDS and TB and malaria, and I think that ought to be worked into this energy thing. There are a million people in the world today only generating electricity and heat in their homes through solar reflectors or tiny solar generators.
Anybody that tells you solar power is not economical is talking about those 1970 schemes to go out at the four corners in the West and build these big old panels and put them into a generator and then send it out over wires to people's homes. That's not what we're talking about. Solar power is entrepreneurial and customized in America and around the world. If there were a serious micro-credit plan out there to go from a million to a hundred-million to five-hundred-million poor people without any electricity, without any power, without any growth at all getting customized solar power, you would obviate the need for India and China, for example, and their successors in interest, the Vietnamese and others, to increase oil consumption by as much as they're going to increase it. You cannot talk them off of this because if you talk them off of this they will think you're trying to make them poorer or retard their growth. You have to show them -- the Chinese have a huge capacity for wind energy growth, and it could be a better economic deal for them than a lot of what they're doing.
Anyway, so I think we start with security, go to the economy, and then make the same sorts of arguments to our friends in the developing world, and then you have to set up the mechanisms to do it. For example, Sir John Browne of British Petroleum, he's trying to make British Petroleum into an energy company, not an oil company. And I told the Saudis the last time I was over there that if I were the king of Saudi Arabia I would buy half of the solar capacity in the world, start at the Equator and work out. And I would make my country the energy capital of the world, not the oil capital of the world. It would change the whole world's attitude; it would enable them to affect a transition, to democratize, to open up without having a collapse.
There's a lot of things out here that need to be done, but you've got to start with security and economy at home and around the world. That's the way to sell this thing, and I think there's an operating majority for it now -- maybe even a voting majority, which is what we've never had before. The press can't be blamed for yawning when I gave these speeches. Their field is for where the politics is. That's the way they write everything. Whether you like it or not, that's what they believe their job is, and they know when the president is talking about something where there's votes and when the president is talking about something where there's not votes. You can't blame them; that's what they think.
Like UNICEF -- Ms. Veneman's out here -- you know, UNICEF has got a job now in the tsunami areas. They're supposed to provide clean water and sanitation in a lot of these areas. I think in the tsunami countries there's an argument to look at how we can fulfill the U.N. mission in a clean energy, environmentally responsible way.
The other thing that you well know reduces greenhouse gas emissions is building more trees. Maybe we should have a whole -- we should be more serious about replanting the forest. There are lots of things that need to be done here, but the more you can tie it to security and economics, the better off you're going to be, in my view, politically.
Mr. Turner: I agree.
Sen. Wirth: We're going to go to questions from all of you in just a minute, but let me turn away from sort of the political strategy in the media to ask the two of you to think and talk a little bit about American business, American corporations and their engagement -- what kind of trends you see out there.
I had the good fortune about two weeks ago of having lunch with Prime Minister Blair when he was here, with a group of 8 or 10 businesspeople. They were presidents of very large American corporations -- including, by the way, the head of the American Chamber of Commerce, who was saying, what we're doing is not nearly rapid enough to take care of the climate issue which just about blew me off my chair -- and all of these businesspeople were talking about the need for very aggressive strategies and for controlling carbon in one way or another. The prime minister looked at everybody in the room and he said, I don't get it. He said, I listen to governors, I listen to Schwarzenegger and Pataki and others, I hear about these 130-some-odd mayors; I talk to people at the sub-Cabinet level, my information is that they are committed to this; all of you sitting around this table, very large American corporations, how do you push this over the line? What's happened? Where is the business voice in all of this? Why hasn't this happened more aggressively?
He was confused about the politics of this and really asked the business community, you know, where are they, where is their push, or can they push? Is it realistic to expect more of a push to come from that direction or is there a framework that has to be developed to make it easier for them to become involved?
President Clinton: Look, when he gave a billion dollars to the U.N., don't you think that had something to do with Dick Holbrook's ability, working for me, to broker that deal with Jesse Helms and pay our U.N. dues? I mean, don't you think that when Ted Turner gave the money to the U.N. it helped to change the whole climate of the public debate?
Sen. Wirth: Absolutely.
President Clinton: Okay, so yeah, it makes a difference. The most important thing that's happened on this issue in the last two months is not anything any public official or ex one like me has said; it's Jeffrey Immelt saying GE was going to give a billion-and-a-half dollars to build a clean energy future. That's the single most important thing that happened.
The second most important thing that's happened is the mayors' coalition because they can actually do something to their cities and about half -- a big number of them are Republicans. So they're basically saying that the people in power in Washington are out of touch with where we think the real world is and we're going to move it.
And the third most important thing that's happening, I think, is a group of Republican senators working with Democrats. They took two or three other conservative Republican senators and they stayed in a building, which said don't go outside at night without a gun or the polar bears will eat you. There was a sign on the building. And these climate scientists showed these guys what was happening to the earth and what would happen. We all know about the blocks of ice breaking off from the South Pole, not as many people know that there is some preliminary indication that the polar ice cap at Greenland might be melting -- not in the North Pole, Greenland. If that happens, the north Atlantic will rise by ten to fifteen feet and you have a whole different world out there.
So anyway, these are the things that matter because you can't -- none of us should be arrogant enough to say, oh well, how foolish they are. Why don't they just see? Look, most people are busy. Most people are busy doing what they do. And most of us like to do tomorrow what we did yesterday well. We were talking about Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse, on how societies collapse. But one of the ways societies collapse is, people like to do what they're good at, even when it's no longer relevant or even when it's counter-productive. And what we're asking them to do, it doesn't cost a lot of money, but it does require them to stop doing what they're good at and start doing something else. This is not easy.
So what my view is, what Immelt did is important, what McCain and Hillary and all of them in the climate change taskforce is Senate is important, what these mayors have done is important. You've got to win this almost a person at a time, a company at a time, an action at a time, until you reach what Malcolm Gladwell called a tipping point. Then it'll just flow in this country. Then we can do what Ted said. Then it'll be like World War II and everybody will be Rosie the Riveter.
Mr. Turner: I agree.
Sen. Wirth: I would add one other item to your list, Mr. President. A month ago at the UN, there was a program of pension funds from around the country, nearly $5 trillion of invested money coming together to ask Wall Street and their investors to take greater care to focus on climate issues. Now that is a real business proposition when those are all of the money managers who want that business and get them to get much more serious about this, another point of very significant leverage.
We're now going to have a chance to open it up. If you all have questions, please raise your hands and there are mobile microphones. Please stand up and identify yourself and let's make sure that they are questions and not prolonged advertisements.
Question: Dar Manavy (ph), I work some with the DLC in New York. Quick question -- you mentioned the policy issue, the good policy. It seems like a lot of the good policy is actually countermanded by even better lobbying. And to solve the political issue, how much of the influence in the lobbying circles comes from exactly the sources, for example, you mentioned Saudi interests, and how much could a statesman, maybe a not so elder statesman, help move the policy forward by attacking the bad science that is coming and emanating from sources that don't have America's best interests in mind?
President Clinton: Well, to be fair, I don't think that the Saudis have to do much. None of the oil producers have to do much. They depend on the American oil companies, and the American automobile companies, and the UAW to do their work for them. Keep in mind the oil thing is largely a transportation issue, and the sort of ideological people. So I think we just have to keep fighting it, but I don't think that foreign interests are largely to blame here. I think this is a homegrown blindness.
Mr. Turner: I'm hard of hearing and I couldn't hear the question.
President Clinton: He said, how much of the problem with Congress is due to the lobbying of monied interests, and don't we need people like you and me to stand up and attack the phony science they're putting out.
Sen. Wirth: Let me ask, Kevin Knoblauch is here from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Kevin, maybe we could ask you, could you make, just talk, give a quick window on some of the phony science and how that is organized and articulated. Could you do that, Kevin? Now the Union of Concerned Scientists, Boston-based, but first rate scientific organization.
Kevin Knoblauch: Thank you, Tim. Well, I think that there is no question that there is an orchestrated attempt emanating from the White House, but also being fueled by Exxon-Mobil and other fossil fuel polluters to inject uncertainty into the science where there is none, or where there is very little. There is an overwhelming and powerful scientific consensus among the scientists around the world who work on climate change that climate change is already well underway, that the burning of fossil fuels by humans is a primary driver, and if we do nothing about it, we're facing some serious trouble. There's plenty of uncertainty in how it will play out, but that is a very powerful consensus, and we need to push back hard and really establish that that consensus is strong, and it's not whether it's happening, but what we do about it.
But I think this question about lobbying dollars is very important, and we need to look very hard at how the money is fueling political positions and expose that. Very recently, it came out in the New York Times that the chief of staff of the Council of Environmental Quality, the chief environmental White House entity who came from the American Petroleum Institute prior to the White House post was editing climates science documents coming up through the federal service. Absolutely inexcusable, a non-scientist who, when this was exposed, resigned and went to work for Exxon-Mobil. So it is a very serious problem.
Polls show, by the way, that most Americans accept that climate change is already underway. Many Americans who grew up in northern climes like I did in Massachusetts know, at least anecdotally, that the ponds that we played hockey on are freezing later and thawing earlier, that the snowfall is staying on the ground less. If you're a duck hunter, you know the wetlands are drying up in certain climates. So anecdotally, and President Clinton talked about this, we need to relate to people at that level. They look around. There are so many people who are backyard gardeners. If we bring it down to that level, they can start to understand the science a bit better.
Sen. Wirth: Thank you, Kevin. Back over here, please, on the left.
President Clinton: I just want to say one thing. I completely agree with that. But let me say, as somebody who has been defeated by the oil companies, the health insurance companies, all the organized interest groups doing one thing or another in my life, one of the things I think we ought to consider is whether some of the changes -- in other words, all we want is a result, right? We don't care who does it. We want to create jobs through a clean energy future that reduces climate change and reduces our dependence on foreign oil. And we've got here Exhibit A sitting with me that you can be rich and still be responsible.
So what I think we ought to do, I would say one of the strategies that I think is underutilized -- I'll just take a minute here -- is to try to create a legal framework and a set of economic incentive that would try to get more of the oil companies to be more like British Petroleum and less like Exxon-Mobil. That is, make it as if there were no oil companies. There were energy companies that happened to produce a little oil, because there won't be a time in our lifetime when we won't need some oil, that's where you want to go. In other words, somebody is going to have to do this energy work and I'd like it if it were just all these new entrepreneurs, but in the best of all worlds, it'd be just like the dot-com revolution, a bunch of them would be bought out by bigger companies. So you've got to try to change the ethos and the economic incentives for the big oil companies and the big coal companies too. You've got to turn them into energy companies, if you really want to succeed, I think. Having been defeated by them repeatedly, I think that's what we ought to be trying to do.
Mr. Turner: Yes, and what they have to do is they really have to want to transfer themselves. You can't make them transfer. They've got to be forward thinking, differently than the railroads. When the airlines first appeared on the scenes, the railroads for the most part thought they were in the railroad business and decided to fight it, rather than that they were in the transportation business and didn't get into the airline industry. Of course, the way things have worked out for the airline industry, they probably made a good long-term decision. But you couldn't know that 50 years ago.
Question: Yes, David Hawkins, Natural Resources Defense Council. I want to return to the question of business and climate policy. The White House listens to business. The Congress listens to business, and when business decides to get serious about a legislative priority, it can make things happen. A lot of the companies that have very good things to say in broad terms about the need for climate policy are still unwilling to engage in the U.S. on getting into the dirty little fight to get actual pieces of legislation going and making it a priority. And I'm interested, Mr. President and Mr. Turner, whether you've got some ideas on how we can get them over that tipping point, get them to accept this as a legislative priority for them, get their trade associations together, and start working to make this happen.
President Clinton: David asked if you had any ideas about how we could get the business people who say they're interested, who support a more aggressive posture on climate change, to actually do something to affect the Congressional climate because the people that are against it are intense, the business community that are for it are tepid. That's basically what he said.
Mr. Turner: Well, all you have to do is -- it just happened two weeks ago when the chairman of General Electric said they're going to make it a major push for GE, the largest company in the world. That could be a tipping point right there. GE is a very progressive company and we, I think, should all be really proud that their new chairman has taken this forward-thinking position. And I'm sure that a lot of other oil or energy companies around the country are taking a new look at it because of his leadership, and hopefully some of them will have the courage and foresight to do the same thing.
President Clinton: Let me say something just about the politics of it. I think, first of all, I completely agree with Ted, but I think that we have to recognize that it's hard for a lot of these companies to lobby the Congress and implicitly lobby against the White House and the leadership of the House who have given them the tax cuts, the end of the tax on dividends, regulatory relief, and all this other stuff. People are talking about how terrible Social Security is. The present day value of the 75-year liabilities in Social Security is $3.7 trillion. The present day value of the last four years of tax cuts over 75 year - $11.2 trillion -- three times Social Security liability. So it's hard to get people to wade into that thicket if they had their handout for the last four years.
On the other hand, it is not hard to get people to ask Congress to take a look at something new that is good for them. So that's how I think this is packaging out to be, this is good for business. It'll create jobs. I think we need to make a different set of arguments here, and again, I think that the business community that wants to do this should go to all these oil companies and coal companies and say, listen guys, one way or the other, the train is going to either leave the station or you guys are going to preside over the decline of America. If you win with this head in the sand policy, you're killing our country's future. So what we'd like to do is to take you along, and we'll try to create a tax and regulatory structure that will enable you to transform into a diversified energy company, generating jobs, creating income and being part of America's future. That's our first choice, but if you don't want to do that, we'd still like our companies to be in business fifty years from now.
And you know, on this science thing, I find it very helpful to have simple things that you can't disagree with. For example, we know if the climate warms for the next fifty years at the rate of the last ten, we're going to lose fifty feet of Manhattan Island. Now, when you leave here today and drive home, just look and see where fifty feet all around this island would come in. We know that. That is not disputable, because we know how much it warmed for the last ten, and we know what the consequences are. So that's what I think the political arguments ought to be, Mike. We ought to cut through the scientific debate with things based on the recent past that are, if you throw it in the future, we know what will happen.
Sen. Wirth: I'd say, I think there's a little gratuitous advice for Al From in this too, to think about the nature of businesses like General Electric, but there is American Electric Power, the largest coal-burning entity in the Western hemisphere talking about controls on carbon. The new joint venture between Cinergy and Duke talking about a cap and trade system. I mean, could you imagine them doing that three years ago? I mean, just unimaginable, now how do we tie them together and get them to help to find how to put this framework that is going to be helpful to them.
President Clinton: Yeah, and let me just say, if you gave all the big electric generators a tax credit for reaching certain efficiency standards in electricity generation, believe me, there's huge amount of wasted base fuel in electric generation, a huge amount. If you gave them all tax credits, you're not really losing any money because they're not going to do this. And you're directly reducing greenhouse gas emissions and directly reducing the use of primarily coal, so why shouldn't we do that?
If General Electric is going to produce all these energy-efficient products, why shouldn't all the people that run all the apartment houses and office buildings in the whole country have some incentive to convert to energy-efficient buildings with the windows and insulation and lighting. And why shouldn't we do that? I mean, we're a country that, you know, we like tax cuts, but why shouldn't we give tax cuts that benefit everybody, even if the money goes to some people, 100 percent of the people would be benefited by this.
Sen. Wirth: Come back here, Will Marshall?
Question: Thank you, Will Marshall, Progressive Policy Institute. The discussion so far is really centered on getting business to reinterpret its interest on energy policy, and I want to ask about another constituency that may be very important in moving us closer to the tipping point that President Clinton talked about, a constituency that has considerable impact on the Republicans, and that is the religious and evangelical community. I'm wondering, Tim, if your group has reached out to those leaders, and how important you think that group is as a potential constituency to swing around into the clean energy coalition? Sen. Wirth: Well, I'd rather ask the President who has had an extraordinary ability to reach to that community. How would you translate this issue to that burgeoning political community in the country?
President Clinton: Anyway, Will asked about the evangelical community, let me say, first of all, I am basically quite encouraged by a lot of what is going on in the evangelical community. I think that there are many people who, while they feel very strongly in accord with the conservative wing of the Republican Party, and they're pro-life and they're, on other cultural issues, don't necessarily want to be seen as the arm of any political party, because they think it undermines the purity of their religious intent. And secondly, I think that they're reading more of the Bible than they used to. They're beginning to read it all. And that's why there's this huge interest in global poverty. And with a massive involvement of the evangelical community in the anti-AIDS fight, massive presence of the evangelical community in the tsunami-affected countries, virtually 100 percent of it to very positive effect.
So I think that the argument has to be made that this is a part of God's mandate to us that the earth is a gift to us and we're supposed to keep it, and if the Christian New Testament has 500 plus references to remember the poor, then in the end, we're not going to be able to help the poor at home and around the world, which basically the evangelical community strongly supports, like the president's Millennium Challenge grant that the evangelical community supported, president's agreement with Tony Blair to forgive the debt of the poorest nations in the world, and to replenish the funds of the World Bank and the international financial communities, the evangelical community supported. I think you have to make the argument that they can't pursue this mission if the house collapses.
And that there are lots and lots of scriptural references, and as far as I know, in every religious scripture, but I'm quite certain that you can find them both in the Torah and in the Christian New Testament or in the Christian Old Testament, about the importance of preserving the gifts of the Earth, which God has given us. So I don't think there's a big problem there and I think there is a lot of interest in it actually. And particularly if you tie it to this effort to reduce global poverty. I will say again, you know, the idea of getting many solar reflectors out there to heat millions of homes instead of just 1 million when, as Ted said, there is a billion people that are living on less than a dollar a day, 2 billion people living on less than $2 a day. I mean, you know there is an enormous opportunity out there to marry this environmental and clean energy future concern in the evangelical community to their concern about poverty, which is genuine and real and positive, I think, in the rest of the world.
Question: Hi, my name is Kim Azzarelli. I'm on the board of the Virtue Foundation, and I'm also the corporate secretary for Avon. I heard Jeff Emil speak recently, and he was really quite inspiring for everybody. My question really is about the pension funds that you mentioned, speaking at the UN recently. I think when you want to incentivize business, I think you hit it on the head when you said that you have to really speak to the pension funds. How serious are they and how do you think they can incentivize business and Wall Street?
Sen. Wirth: We've had two meetings at the UN. The UN convened them. Amir Dossal, from the UN is here, was the agent pulling them together. This last time, I think, a little over $5 trillion of invested money, came up with a set of principles of what the pension funds were going to ask their investing entities to do. The people who invest all that money for them to aggressively look at the companies in which they invest. What are their climate policies? Do they have a climate policy? How are they thinking about climate policy, not setting any kind of a standard? We're nowhere near that yet.
But rather, beginning to think about how do you inject this into the financial community to understand the risk of climate change and more recently, the opportunity of climate change. You know, what's it going to mean if sea levels are rising, and are you thinking about that as a company? What is the reinsurance liability that you're carrying? There are a whole series of issues. Is there a long-term risk where climate might be viewed in such a way a superfund was once viewed, with a long-term liability that then comes back. There are a series of very complicated and very interesting issues.
Mike Johnston is here from Capital Assets. Mike, do you want to say a word or two about this? And Mike has been on our advisory committee helping to carry this out and is one of the senior people on the largest mutual fund operation in the United States of America. Mike?
Mike Johnston: Thank you, Tim. I think the first thing I would say is, almost everyone like we that manage money for other people always are concerned about the fiduciary duty we have of following what we call the prudent man rule. It was a rule that was passed about 30 years ago, saying that we shouldn't do anything in investing other people's money that is imprudent. And so, there has always been a concern by people like us that the issues, as Ted Turner said, of climate change are so far out into the future that we really cannot, should not be incorporating them into our day-to-day investment decision making.
I think what you have done successfully, what the United Nations foundation is doing successfully, it's bringing the future to now. In other words, Ted Turner talked about how do you change horizons and so, if an insurance company talks about the fact that they are now writing their risks based on longer-term liabilities, that brings the future back to the present in a very real way, and we're all looking for ways in which to do that. And I think it's beginning to work.
I think people investing other people's money as fiduciaries are beginning to consider this, as both an opportunity and a risk, because if in fact, solar panels begin to propagate around the world to a billion people or some number like that, all of a sudden that doesn't look like such a tiny industry anymore. General Electric talking about a billion plus, a billion and a half dollars, and that sixty percent of their future growth will come from emerging markets. That begins to bring opportunity to the community of large investors, and I think UN foundation is actually making that happen.
President Clinton: If I could go back to -- yes, would you give the microphone to her, but I want to respond one more time to the question. There are two ways to do this. You could have the pension funds do what Tim said, draw up standards and then give preference to companies that are themselves producing a clean energy future, pursuing a clean energy future. Some pension funds, including some public pension funds, actually invest in what you might call special-purpose investment funds, you know, funds that, for example, it's always a small part of their investment, but it could be a big part of a new market that invests in minority neighborhoods or minority- or women-owned businesses or, you know, like that.
But you could have people take a closer look at investing in the producers of the most modern wind technology. Wind technology is much better now than it used to be because you have the turbines are much more refined. They operate at slower wind speeds, so they operate more efficiently. There is even technology to store the energy pent-up now. There are all kinds of things being done, but it's still relatively under-capitalized.
Small-scale solar technology is still largely being made by smaller companies. The 306 solar panels in my library were made by a California company. So there could be more direct investment in these areas if you had serious assessments of what their real market potential was and what the cost per kilowatt hour of their product was really going to be five years from now, and you take account of the fact that every time they double in capacity, it goes down dramatically. I mean, I think that's the kind of stuff that needs to be done. Not just persuading companies to pursue a clean energy future, but these companies need to get funded. If they've got something to sell that's economical, it's going to sell like hotcakes.
Sen. Wirth: Just one final note just on that front, out of the investor's summit, the pension funds there agreed to pool a billion dollars to go into just exactly this sort of investment, which they are going to do on this sort of making special funds. So that's a start in that direction. Before I turn it back to From, let me, Mr. President, any closing comments that you might like to make to the group here?
President Clinton: Just that I agree with Ted, I think this is sort of the great adventure, the great opportunity, and the great hazard of our age. It is true that you don't precisely what is going to happen with climate change and you don't know precisely when it's going to happen. But since the Cold War has been over, the biggest threat from nuclear, chemical and biological weapons has been in smaller weapons in the hands of rogue states or terrorists, which could kill millions of people, but probably not now, unlike in the Cold War, end society and civilization as we know it. Therefore, if you look at where we are with climate change, if the worst turns out to be true and if we continue like blind men rushing into the cave, it's about the only thing out there that could end the way all of us do things, maybe a hundred years from now, maybe 150 years from now. But we'd never forgive ourselves if we didn't change course, as Ted said, especially since changing course is relatively easy, will generate tons of jobs, and will rescue the American economy and enable us to continue to be a leading force for peace and freedom and security in the world.
Now, I just think this is a no-brainer. And it's really a case where the facts have outraced social organization. And the gentleman who talked about the insurance business and the lady from Avon and all of us, all of you from the business community, basically it's always a gap between the people who know something needs to be done and society getting organized to do it. But usually it's not a hazardous gap, and so what we have to do is close the partisan divide, close the ideological divide, and close the factual divide and you know, get on with it, because it's a phenomenal opportunity to provide the American economy, and it's the only sensible thing to do to keep our society going.
And again, I'll say to you, read Jared Diamond's book, or Norman Cantor's book on Antiquity or any of these books you feel it. One of the reasons societies collapse is they keep on doing what they do well instead of what they should be doing now. And we all live our lives that way. We like to do what we did well yesterday today. It's fun and we know how to do it and it saves a lot of trouble. And once in awhile, you can't do that anymore and that's where we are. I just wish you well, I thank you for doing this and I thank Ted Turner for his long-standing involvement in this and his involvement of my friend Tim here. They're doing great and the rest of us can do our part.
Mr. Turner: I would just like to just speak for one moment on a subject that the president just spoke about at the beginning of his closing statement about the nuclear weapons. Even though there is no imminent danger of a full-scale nuclear war between Russia and the United States, in the last ten years, we have allowed our relations with Russia to deteriorate somewhat, and we do that at tremendous danger. We should remember that there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in both Russia and the United States, aimed at each other on hair-trigger alert, and it's pretty conceivable that they would deliberately be launched by the president of the United States or the president of Russia, but there could be an accident. There could be a miscalculation. And if there are, the world ends in an afternoon, so there really is not greater threat to humanity than the existence and the hair-trigger alertness of those nuclear arsenals. And while we're dealing with getting things straightened out in the world, the sooner we get those weapons off hair-trigger alert and the sooner we get rid of them, the safer we're going to be. Thank you.
Sen. Wirth: Great, well, let me -- I'm sure I'm joined by all of you in thanking President Clinton and Ted Turner for a remarkable discussion;. Let me turn it over to Al From.
Al From: Thank you very much, Mr. President, Ted Turner, Tim Wirth, for that wonderful discussion. And now, I'm just going to ask the president to come up and formally present the Clinton and DLC Clinton Center Leadership and National Service Award to Ted Turner.
President Clinton: When Al From talked to me a few years ago about doing this and we gave the first award to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, then the lieutenant governor of Maryland who was responsible for making Maryland the only state in the country to require community service as a condition of graduating from high school, something that I recommended along with the former Republican governor Tom Kean, almost 20 years ago now, it began a tradition that I hope will last a long time, because now that I am back in private life, I have an even greater appreciation I think than I did before, and all the years that I was an elected official, for the pivotal role played by private citizens.
It started with our whole idea for citizen service through Americorps, and by the way, in about a month, less than a month now, I'm going to Africa, and in South Africa, we now have 120 young black and white South Africans in their first citizen service effort, working in neighborhoods half of them have never been in before in their lives. It's a really good beginning of that, so I hope the DLC can take a lot of pride in that.
I'm glad you're giving this award to Ted Turner because he is 66 years old and he could be on a yacht in the Riviera, he could be staying out in his ranch in Montana, he could be satisfied with having founded CNN and owned sports teams and had one of the more interesting lives in the 20th century or any century. But instead, he's tried to revitalize the UN, tried to give us a new energy future, tried to alert the American people of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction, all just because he thinks it's the right thing to do. And I think we should reward people for doing things they don't have to do just because they think it's the right thing to do. He has done that to a remarkable extent for a very, very long time. I admire him and I'm grateful to him, and I'm honored to be able to present this award to him.
Mr. Turner: Thanks. Thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
Mr. From: Thank you all for a wonderful program, and now back to business.