Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome.
President Clinton says the energy tax will be fair to all sectors.
Not all sectors agree.
While many in the environmental community applaud the President's move, the energy industry
itself does not.
Also this time, new evidence in the ice of Greenland indicates polar ice could thaw or
expand nearly overnight.
And the George Bundy on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the cleaning up of our nuclear arsenals
today, a new missile crisis.
It is a problem of whether a man and his planet are going to be reinforcing to each other
or destructive to each other.
The Environment Show, a national production made possible by Heming's Motor News, the
National Bible of the Old Car Hobby, monthly from Bennington, Vermont, and by the J.M.
Kaplan Fund of New York.
And this is Bruce Robertson.
In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Clinton outlined his economic
package designed, he said, to reduce the federal deficit and stimulate the economy.
Along with cuts in federal expenditures and a restructured income tax formula, Mr.
Clinton also called for an energy tax.
And I want to tell you why I selected this and why I think it's a good idea.
I recommend that we adopt a BTU tax on the heat content of energy as the best way to provide
us with revenue to lower the deficit because it also combats pollution, promotes energy
efficiency, promotes the independence economically of this country, as well as helping to reduce
the debt.
And because it does not discriminate against any area, unlike a carbon tax, it's not too
hard on the coal states.
Unlike a gas tax, it's not too tough on people who drive a long way to work.
Unlike an ad velorum tax, it doesn't increase just when the price of an energy source goes
up.
And it is environmentally responsible.
It will help us in the future as well as in the present with the deficit.
In less than a minute, the president hinted at the future of energy use and environmental
protection.
The reaction has been swift and specific, more in a moment.
First, what is a BTU?
A British civil unit is the amount of heat required to raise one pound of water, one Fahrenheit
degree.
The result of the BTU is the amount of heat required to raise one pound of water,
one Fahrenheit degree.
And it is a very small unit.
So when you hear millions of BTUs, it's like a gallon of oil has 138,600 BTUs.
Maybe to put it on a more recognizable factor, if you take one wooden kitchen match and you burn
it all the way through, that is one BTU.
This explains how the tax will affect a barrel of oil.
A barrel of oil has approximately 5.8 million BTUs per barrel of oil.
And what you do is you apply that tax rate and you can get the total tax per physical
unit.
For instance, in this case, the total tax on a BTU or on a barrel of oil would be approximately
$3.47.
Now the tax is being levied sort of in two rates.
There is the basic tax, which is 25.7 cents per million BTU.
And then we have what we call the oil supplement, which is 34.2 cents per BTU.
Now that's an additional part of the tax that goes on oil.
That does not affect the other fuels such as coal, natural gas, electricity generated
by nuclear or hydro power.
Based on these figures, say administration officials, the Treasury Department will take
in $21.5 billion.
That's about $320 from an average family of four.
J. Hare, President of the National Wildlife Federation.
You tell us you were called to the White House for advice.
Specifically Mr. Hare, what did you recommend to the President on this BTU proposal?
Are you in favor of it?
It was very clear that had that not enjoyed the strong enthusiastic support of environmentalist
I doubt they have been moving on forward because there's certainly a number of forces,
particularly the petroleum industry that are opposing that.
So I think it was very important for us to be consulted.
They understood that was important and it was very important that they got our support
in the National Wildlife Federation.
I enthusiastically support what President Clinton proposed the other evening.
But why do you favor this particular tax mechanism over any other that has been discussed?
Well, first off, the National Wildlife Federation, I think most environmental groups felt this
way actually would have favored a carbon-based tax based on the amount of carbon in a substance
because when it's combust, of course, carbon dioxide is one of the principal greenhouse
warming gases.
The problem with that politically, and quite frankly, was strictly a political question,
is that the impacts of that fall disproportionately hard on the users of coal,
whether it's public utilities or other industrial sources,
and that kind of approach now isn't politically doable.
The next best approach is the BTU approach.
And we would favor that over by far over just a general gasoline tax
because gas in this country is basically way undervalued right now.
If you're in Europe, you pay two to three times what we pay for gasoline here.
What we're trying to do is provide economic incentives for people to reduce the amount of use
of gasoline, kinds of products and driving to look to more energy-efficient sources of transportation.
Also, we're looking for obvious ways to reduce the national deficit.
And this approach where it goes across all sources of energy is equitable.
It's fair. It hits all sources fairly and does not hit on any one sector.
A gasoline tax, of course, would impact those that are dependent on driving large,
long distances to go to work or in the western states where they have long distance between towns and so forth.
And the gasoline tax is really a very regressive tax.
The BTU tax, by contrast, is quite progressive.
Jay Hare, president of the National Wildlife Federation, speaking to us from Washington.
We go now to Mr. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club from San Francisco.
Mr. Pope, you are on record the Sierra Club for favoring an additional surtax on the use of coal,
something not called for by the president.
In your opinion, what else is missing from the president's plan overall?
The package probably has more highway construction in it than we would like.
It's also got a lot of mass transit, but we probably would say,
wait a minute, let's not build any new roads in this country for a while.
Let's figure out how we really can move ourselves around more efficiently.
And the package does have new highway construction in it.
There are, I'm not sure that all of the opportunities that exist in low-income weatherization
have been taken advantage of in this plan.
We would prefer, as I indicated, an additional surcharge on the use of coal that's not present.
We would have liked to see an increase in the gas guzzler tax for fuel-initiation automobile.
That's not in the plan.
So they didn't take all the ideas we gave them,
but the fact they didn't adopt them in this plan doesn't mean that they're dead permanently.
Simply means we still have to persuade them of the case for them.
Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, speaking to us from San Francisco.
The American Farm Bureau is on record opposing the president's energy plan
in a statement released Dean Kleckner, president of the AFB,
says the tax proposal would mean as much as $600 million in added costs for the nation's farmers and ranchers.
Kleckner says the total package will cost a typical Midwest grain farmer an additional $800 a year.
William O'Keefe, executive vice president of the American Petroleum Institute,
a leading trade organization representing the oil and gas industry,
is equally opposed to the plan.
An energy tax, whether it's a BTU tax or carbon tax or a gasoline tax,
is a harmful tax because our economy relies so much on abundant, reasonably priced energy.
Every economic study, independent study that's been done has reached the conclusion.
That a tax of this magnitude will reduce economic growth,
will reduce consumer spending, will reduce exports and lead to job loss.
So we think this is not consistent with the goal of growing a stronger economy
and creating new, high-paying jobs.
Well, then, so what are you projecting you at the American Petroleum Institute?
What are your figures as to the effect of this tax?
First of all, the average family of four is going to spend $500 more in direct and indirect costs
for energy and the products they buy.
And this will show up every time they fill up the gasoline tank,
turn on a switch or buy a product that is made where energy is a major component.
The economy will grow less than it would.
And it is clear from all the analysis that's been done that this kind of tax will destroy jobs, not create them.
The administration has estimated a gross revenue of $21.5 billion raised from this BTU tax.
You estimate it to be much higher at $33 billion,
meaning as you have just indicated we will be paying more in taxes than the administration has said.
What is your formula, the mathematics, by which you have arrived at this conclusion?
We currently consume 6 billion barrels of oil a year in this country.
The tax on oil is $3.47.
So you multiply those two and you get roughly $21 billion.
Then the tax on oil on gas and coal will be roughly 5 billion a piece.
As Lucas at the Department of Energy has put it.
It is going to result in the cleaner environment.
We will, for the first time, be taking a leadership role in addressing environmental issues.
And by increasing this energy efficiency, we are going to be reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
And that's another significant reduction.
There will be about 25 million metric tons in the year 2000.
And this right there, that step right there will help us to fulfill the commitments that we made earlier last year at the Rio Summit.
Joseph Lucas, Energy Consultant at the Department of Energy, speaking to us from Washington.
The energy tax proposal is what one small part of the entire economic package delivered by the president to Congress and the nation.
We can't expect a great deal to change before any of it becomes law.
This is Bruce Robertson.
Dr. Kendrick Taylor reads ice the way some scientists study tree rings.
As part of the Greenland Ice Sheet project, Taylor studied the rings in ice cylinders six meters long, drilled from the Greenland Ice Sheet.
These ice rings take scientists back through 200,000 years of climate changes.
The last glaciation or glacial period ended about 11,000 years ago.
As Taylor studied the ice from this period, he made a surprising discovery.
Long behold, we can see that last glaciation, but we had kind of thought that there would be sort of a gradual change in the last glaciation that you would just step into it very quickly.
But instead what we find is that the transition in the glaciation occurs very quickly.
In fact, it occurs on the order of just a few years.
And there's several glaciation and several time periods that we go back and look at.
And every time we have one of those major climate transitions between like glacial conditions and warmer conditions like we have now, we find the transitions occur very quickly, maybe less than a decade or so.
The for his discovery, Taylor, like most scientists, believed it took hundreds of years for a significant climate change.
And he suspected the climate transition was gradual. His research tells a different story.
Instead of it being sort of smooth of ramp over the decade, that there's actually several false starts.
I call them kind of flickers, much like a flickering light switch.
And that you'll go into one of these cold or glacial periods for maybe a period of 10 years and then you'll get warmer again for 10 years.
And there'll be a cold or glacial period for 10 years and then finally you'll change to permanent warmer condition.
Taylor conducted his work on ice cores excavated with a custom made drill 100 feet long, six inches in diameter.
The cores were then placed on an assembly line, manned by the scientists.
We run it through, we call our core processing line, which is almost like a little factory.
We're the core runs along on a set of rollers to different stations. And we make different measurements at different stations.
So the first station we do go through is a horizontal band saw. We cut the core off into a couple different pieces.
That it runs into a light table where we actually look at it underneath the slight table and you can actually see the different layers that we're talking about there.
And then we run it underneath the electrical conductivity measurement, which is the equipment that I run, where we measure the electrical conductivity of the core.
And then as we're doing this to these other pieces of core that were cut off by the horizontal saw, they go off to different laboratories where you have chemical measurements,
in particular measurements, or isotopic or gas measurements made on them.
Taylor discovered the rapid climate change using electrical conductivity measurement or ECM, his specialty.
ECM measures how well ice conducts electrical currents.
If the ice has low conductivity, it contains dust. Taylor believes the high dust concentrations in portions of the ice core he drilled were brought by southern winds, ushering in a warmer climate as well.
There is a change in the atmosphere circulation, which changed the wind patterns, changed how fast the wind was blowing or the wind was coming from it, brought different amounts of dust up to the greenland issue.
So then your question is probably going to be, well, how did you get the wind patterns to change that quickly in just a few years?
And that most likely has to be tied into some sort of change in ocean circulation.
While we have strong reasons to believe that there are preferred patterns of ocean circulation, where the ocean circulates in one particular mode.
And then what it seems to happen is that that mode of circulation can change very quickly into another circulation mode.
When that changes, it changes the way he just transports between say the tropical regions and the Arctic regions.
And that obviously has a big impact on the climate and the weather and those different spots.
Taylor says the idea that ocean current circulations could have ended the glacial periods quickly is still just a theory.
Taylor says any predictions for future climate change are uncertain.
One of the big questions of course you have to ask is if the climate could change in just a few years in the past, could it do that again?
And we are not quite sure about that yet because we don't fully understand the mechanisms that were responsible for the past, changes in the past.
It may be that you have to have large ice sheets on North America and Scandinavia to get these fast changes again.
And since those ice sheets aren't there currently, maybe you can't get these really rapid transitions like we've seen.
Maybe those rapid transitions can't occur at present time.
But then on the other hand though we don't fully understand the mechanism, so it is possible that you could have one of these changes in ocean circulation occurring in modern times.
And it kind of makes one wonder because these changes would be very fast.
We don't necessarily see a lot of precursor events that warn us when they're going to come.
And so you have to kind of wonder if maybe it might happen again and if it does, it would have a pretty big impact.
Dr. Kendrick Taylor is an associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute at the University of Nevada, Reno.
He is also part of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project. Global warming is one impact of particular concern to Dr. Taylor.
He warns there may be a threshold in the environment that regulates climate change.
And if we cross it, his research shows the shift back to the ice age will be much faster than we ever realized.
This is Bruce Robertson.
McGeorge Bundy was the first to tell President John F. Kennedy.
On the morning of Tuesday, October 16, 1962, Bundy's special adviser to the President reported to Kennedy that aerial intelligence photographs taken two days earlier showed evidence of Soviet installation of nuclear warhead ballistic missiles on the island of Cuba, less than 90 miles from the coast of Florida.
For the next 13 days recalls Bundy, the world of nations looked down the gun barrel of the Cuban missile crisis.
Bundy says the potential long-term threat was overshadowed by the immediate short-term threat.
As we experienced it at the time, I think all of us, whether we were in or out of government, it was a very intense period of danger in that nobody knew from top to bottom and in a sense it was easier to be near the top because you knew what was not going to happen.
At least in the next few minutes by your own choice.
But nobody knew whether this confrontation could be resolved without direct conflict between the two military superpowers, also nuclear superpowers.
And since the confrontation was itself about a change of deployment of nuclear weapons, it had doubly, perhaps more for psychological and logical reasons, a sense of nuclear danger to it.
So the direct experience of immediate nuclear danger is one of the things that most of the people who lived through it came out with.
The missiles in Cuba might be seen as representing the height of the Cold War itself, representing all of the military and the ideological conflicts of the time.
Do you feel that because of that experience, no nation ever will come to nuclear blows?
Well, I never is a very big word, but if you say that one of the things that I think both sides and the watching world took away from this particular crisis was a feeling that it would have been a good thing to avoid that nobody wanted to be that close.
And I think there is a connection between that reaction to the crisis and the fact that the two did not get that close ever again.
Nuclear bombs had been used only twice before in warfare, and though at the time in 1962 both the Soviet Union and the United States were exploding bombs for testing purposes, did you, the president and the rest of his advisors in the cabinet bear in mind the full force possible in the nuclear bomb?
Or was this in a sense just another weapon, you know, a really big pistol?
I'm not saying that it is a real big pistol, but neither can I say that we had a full appreciation of all the possible long run worldwide effects of large numbers of thermonuclear explosions.
We had an entirely adequate sense of how enormously destructive, even a limited exchange of limited power weapons would be, so that I don't think there was any problem in our perception of the uniquely destructive capabilities that were inherent in the existence of the two great ones.
Great big thermonuclear armaments.
After 13 days in October of 1962, Nikita Khrushchev and President Kennedy reached an agreement. The missiles would be withdrawn in Cuba in exchange for a US agreement never to invade Cuba.
Well, that crisis passed.
Today, though, Mr. Bondi, we face another nuclear crisis. How to dispose of unused and unwanted bombs and the products used to make them.
If President Kennedy were in office today and you were his special advisor on security matters, what would you say to him by way of advice now about the relationship between environmental protection and national security?
The first thing I do is advise him to get somebody who knew more about it than I do, or let me get one on my staff because the particular course of action you need to take has to be a matter of knowing what's urgent and who's for it and who's against it and how much money it would cost and whether you've got something else that is even more important that you want to do first.
And I wouldn't set myself up as the teacher, but I would think it was entirely proper to say to him, this is now clearly the kind of problem that the President of the United States has to put up front not only in terms of national policy but of international policy.
It is a problem of whether a man and his planet are going to be reinforcing to each other or destructive to each other.
If you want to call it international security because it involves agreement with a lot of other sovereign states or because that sounds better to appropriations committees, fine.
But whatever you do put it up front where you are able to lead the country and for that you need somebody who knows more about it than I do.
George Bundy, Special Security Advisor to President John F. Kennedy, his council was especially called for during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962.
Bundy spoke to us on the campus of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. They are on a lecture tour recently. And this is Bruce Robertson.
And that's our report on the environment show this week. The environment show is a program about the environment, the air, water, soil, wildlife, and people of our common habitat.
Karen Kelly prepared our piece on the Greenland Ice Sheet project this week and our coverage of President Clinton's address produced by C-SPAN, the Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network.
Fortica set copy of this program called 1-800-767-1929. This week asked for the environment show program number 165.
The environment show is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for its content, Dr. Alan Shartock, executive producer and this is Bruce Robertson.
The environment show is made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York. And by Heming's Motor News, the national Bible of the Old Car Hobby, monthly from Bennington Vermont.
