An hour with Secretary Roderick Bremby

from the dole institute of politics at the university of kansas a pr presents an hour with robert browning i'm j mcintyre rye bread be a secretary of kansas department of health and environment appointed by governor sebelius in two thousand three he gain national headlines and great controversy last year when he denied a permit to build two coal fired power plants near halt in southwest kansas the future of coal fired energy in kansas is still in question as governor civilians and the state legislature battle over this issue blitzer is part of the university lecture series africa comments thoughts about the bio diversity and fifteen defensive museum of art and the call center for the humanities at the university of memphis and now here is a problem thank you all for coming out in such a cold night before get started time when i wanna do is acknowledge just a couple people in the audience we are all very large agency

and cady at fairly large agency adhd but the agency has more than a secretary in fact we had a very good director of environment division run hammer schmidt who went on to the epa and but stepping in for ron is john mitchell john mitchell is our acting director of the division of environment and so are our bench is very deep john just didn't come to the agency's been there for thirty years and so we're really well positioned to carry on one other person is susan kang says in kenya so policy director like adhd who helps to make sure that we are focusing on the right policy issues make sure that people get to the right places to talk about the right things are for the agency and for katie at tonight is going to be an awkward night for me in a way because i really cannot disclose as much or talk about as much as i'll probably would like to so as i mentioned to dylan none of dylan is here but it was when ed cage

called yesterday on i said isn't it a tight vote and it will try to walk as well as we can but let me start by offering greetings not only from our governor but also from the thousand plus men and women who make up the kansas department of the environment they are fantastic group of people i'm honored to work with them i can think of another place worth like to work or people that i'd like to work with this has been a very trying time for them as well and so i just don't acknowledge the work that they do our mission it at is to promote the health and environment of all kansans by promoting responsible choices that's a little different mission that we've had in the past because we know that on the one hand we are regulatory agency but we believe that on the other hand the best way to do that is by educating by providing technical assistance by hoping people comply with the rules and regulations that are adopted and are made by

policymakers and so we tried a cult that convergence happen around complaints and so we want people to be able to make responsible choices for themselves in their communities we think that by doing so we can achieve our vision of healthier kansans living and safe and sustainable environments that's why i get up everyday is hopefully the work that we do collectively will result in healthier kansans living and safe and sustainable and bart i'm i'm sharing this with you hopefully a frame this decision process that we went through it and you will see hopefully that it's not far from where we ended up tonight or three areas i want to focus on on the first and foremost getting deference to my academic background i wanna talk a little bit about a frame from public administration a

policy administration dichotomy i think it will help also to share and explain why it is that we are where we are today i think it will also explain some of attention some of the frustration and even some of the anger that exists around the decision but i do need to spend some time on this this concept this theory because truly it is something that i was i trained well on end and i firmly believe secondly i want to talk about and you might think of summarizes whimsical but i'm going to clear the air on some items and go in and our office today we chose about eleven twelve items and he said you know it would be nice to clear the air on these items and where these things and so will do that for for a little while and then lastly i wanna wrap up by talking about an emerging economy i wanna leave tonight and hopefully leave you with some hope that out of all of this that we're currently going

through kansas will be in a much better place i was asked to dinner i'll paraphrase so if the decision should go the other way from the way that you can issued how we feel about that and and again my response is that you know the policymakers will spoken and as a bureaucrat i am i can help to bring alliance i can help to bring implementation to that policy position but i don't wanna get ahead of myself and at the end of the day i think there's a lot more to be said about oh where we are really start again mike talking a little bit about all civilization dichotomy and i and in some of your pa is in here and i'm just doing is rudimentary stuff just you know tune it out for a while and understand a very

long but john woodrow wilson was probably one of our most intellectual presidents er not only served as governor of new jersey before coming to the white house but he spent a lot of time in academia created some very interesting our structures and thought a lot about how policy how administration how government how the process of governance could even function more specifically was thinking about the federal government but we apply that to local government state government in the context of a policy administration dichotomy let's say for example one of these circles and it really doesn't matter which would represent the policy sphere that is the group of elected officials the people who are chosen by the electorate to make decisions for them they're the ones who express the values of a community of a state and of the nation and so they have a legitimate

right to make decisions oftentimes they vote to express those decisions and then the others circle they didn't choose would be the administration or the administrators they're the ones who are chosen to implement those policies now why was this important well around the turn of the century before we have reform government reform oftentimes appointed officials the administrators were hired by policymakers and yet the administrator would do the work of the policymaker regardless of what that values war within the society they were hired hands some people call them hacks they were political tools wilson thought that the administrator should be relatively independent but only within a sphere of implementing policy now if your most closely in all reality sometimes those

circles converge sometimes administrators the year into the policy arena and sometimes policymakers the year into the administrative arena now when you talk about later tonight is exactly that convergence that occurred this past year in kansas around the permit decision for the emissions of a coal fired plant it is in that convergence then that there is a re thinking about roles responsibilities rights rules rule of law even and the appropriateness of one group taking an action that is in the domain of the other depending on your perspective now i'm in a stout beer on that the radical

stuff and talk more about the reality of what what happened but i want to try to keep in mind that frame around the policy administration dichotomy you know that at times there is an overlap and at times those overlaps have to be sorted out new rules have to be developed so that everyone is comfortable with the role that each other will play this afternoon so my staff members and i sat down and started thinking about so what could be useful and this evening what could you say to add some depth or some greater awareness about what has happened and we came up with about ten or eleven things that we've heard and we thought this would be a good opportunity to impart upon clear the air and so i'm a walk through some of these and to hopefully if you will share some information if you believe that

conversely i think there's a question answer session or period and we'd be happy to work to address those now but we start with the first one the increases dependence on foreign powers some of you may have seen this add others may not this was a bad run and most of the major kansas newspapers in fact consumers are as well this ad was run on to suggest that because of the recent decision by the civilians administration kansas will import more natural gas from countries like russia venezuela and iran and now in terms of trying to clear there would be no additional dependence on these foreign powers or four hours like these because the us imports some ninety six percent of our natural gas from canada we have never as a nation nor as a state imported any natural gas from any of these countries so

in trying to clear the air there is no increased dependence upon foreign powers for natural gas there is a conversation about increasing dependence on oil but that does not have a route in this decision about coal fired plants the next one is out transmission lines won't get built there was a conversation about transmission lines to move energy to a different plain as well as to make way for renewable energy from wind to get to different markets there was the assertion that if this the nile was supported that these bees transmission lines would get built on what i'm trying to show and they may not be very clear but it's an article from two thirteen two thousand at it reads it see great plains expansion in kansas approved what

it sees as a company that builds transmission lines they agreed and have said that they are going to go forward with this critical infrastructure regardless of whether they're permitting decision stands or is overturned so transmission lines will get built need for western kansas base load energy the permit decision was about a fourteen hundred megawatt facility initially was a twenty one hundred megawatt facility three seven hundred marijuana plants based on what we've read another fourteen hundred megawatt tell that would be allocated in the state roughly fifteen percent of the energy to unintended to earn twenty five megawatts would remain in the state of kansas oklahoma through i think at golden spread would receive about four hundred megawatts of energy and

colorado through tristate would receive seven hundred megawatt or prevent all of the energy from one of the plants these numbers don't act exactly told to fourteen hundred but this is what we have available to us so the project allocation around resources and base load energy for western kansas if if that is taken is somewhere between two hundred and ten tune and twenty five megawatts and so you're left with fourteen hundred megawatt permit for base load energy in kansas of some two hundred and two in twenty five megawatts crow say there's a gentleman who is it beautiful editorial cartoonist out of wichita and this is how he captures does our arrangement he says that in this was from four five or april fifth two

thousand seven long before we got to this place is that other states get the energy and kansas gets the shaft that is done that is how to be characterized but metadata high electrical costs there's then also discussion about this facility is needed to reduce or maintain some marketability around iowa wind energy costs are thought to be some forty percent higher than the rest of the state and so it helps to equalize the cost of electrical power out west so the energy for it this facility would be on the western side of the state for energy prices are not quite as great but that's that's one of the things that we heard how many of you've heard this week lawrence kansas has seven dirtiest coal plants in the us and

i often wondered why that was not discussed in greater detail now you can get to lawrence being more than a mere then a sunflower facility if you work average is if you look at seale two per kilowatt hour of operation but when you're looking at grossed totals and that's what we see in fact the large facility is sound a little over four million about four point five million tons per year and all and that push you write about i think it's two hundred eighty two national jeffries is about sixteen nationally and be some far facility would be right around thirty two thirty three somewhere behind a facility in alabama

but again lawrence being the dirtiest plant in the nation some of the dirtiest you can get there from here looking at gross numbers you can get there from here if you do some lamb i think its interpolation rather than extrapolation we've also heard if not here then holly colorado oklahoma iowa and possibly the missouri would be a home for these new facilities but there's something going on nationally and and i'll get to that just a little bit but more than twenty plants were canceled and three dozen were delayed oklahoma denied a plant in two thousand seven iowa tonight one although they have a couple others under permit you may recall the article from last week in missouri that plan was approved

by the owners of the facility decided to delay actually we decided to cancel plans to build a facility so it's not just kansas but the likelihood that a denied facility to go anywhere is it's quite remote we also heard that carbon is necessary for life and it is climate change is good and it can be but in the context of what we're looking at in terms of eleven million tons annually missions we got an equivalence any too much of anything is backed by a you know as just a truism but in terms of carbon we need a certain amount to live no question about it but too much can spoil the habitat in which we live

equivalent would be a millionaire a passenger cars a year on the streets and roads and byways and highways of kansas or two and fifty five million seedlings growing for ten years they couldn't process the c o two in fact trees forests are really a good thing because because they can help close the air on how many people have gas powered propane powered barbecue grills on why few hands without but at the equivalent of about four hundred and fifty million of those is what would be a net it every year this facility we could then divert waste from landfills as equivalent to what this plan would release each year about three and a half million tons or the carbon footprint of about six and twenty eight thousand americans we all have a footprint some

larger than others i am twenty tons is about average too much is not a good thing global warming is a hoax i think many of you have heard that arm and before going further i want to make this crystal clear i'm not a climatologist i am not a meteorologist this is not my field of study all i know is what i read and so i'm sharing with you i'm not trying to argue this point with you there are better people to argue the point with you in fact there's one here at the university of kansas who actually served on the international panel of climate change dr fatima and then there is a professor who was also our soil

on i don't even know the term for what he does because it's so specialized that is a case they share price was also an ipcc so if you want to get into a discussion and i mean a vigorous discussion about climate change in the scientific components i'd invite you to visit my friends today and i hope i didn't put them on point but we've been keeping records ansari records have been kept since about eighteen sixty about the surface temperatures of the globe and what we know is that on average they've been rising initially what the war saying is that okay so we should really talk about greenhouse gases and that term went nowhere that most people thought well what's the problem with greenhouse gases ago greenhouse all the greenhouses i been or are nice places to visit won't it obscured the fact that we have layered

over the earth a blanket of gases and now the temperature is rising and it has effects on the air and our habitat eleven of the warmest years on record have occurred since nineteen ninety and five warmest of all occurred in the last seven years in descending order two thousand to nineteen ninety eight two thousand three two thousand one nineteen ninety seven and the pace at which average global temperatures have been rising or about point six degrees celsius over the past century accelerated in the last two decades to an equivalent of one degree celsius per century the past one thousand years of an army in the a northern hemisphere you can see very acute rise now as i said before don't take my word for climate change because i've not written a single study had not done work

but if you don't wanna take my word for it which i am urging him not to in you don't wanna take the word of the ipcc and after lunch climate change us national academy of science as a group have the same belief that it's not a hoax geological society of america has come to the same position that is now out the american geophysical union they too have come to the same conclusion that it's not a hoax the american institute of physics come to the same conclusion that it's not a hoax and the american meteorological society they too as a society if scientists as a body of scientists have come to the same conclusion that there's something to this climate change issue one of the things that we've heard and i will backtrack on summer school but later is that

this violates the rule of law what happened in topeka in october violated the rule of law in april of last year us supreme court rendered what we believe to have been a significant finding massachusetts the state of massachusetts to join with other states from around the country sued the us department of and what the environmental protection agency about whether standard could be created for gas emissions seal two missions from tailpipes of cars of all things the epa argued couple of different tax but largely the supreme court ruled that you know carbon dioxide greenhouse gases they are a pollutant when that relationship was made in terms of a

pollutant that ben rang bells i think across the country in terms of what then do you do in a state where you have a responsibility to address pollutants the us supreme court and this is just one of the paragraphs said in short epa has offered no reason explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change it's action was therefore arbitrary capricious or otherwise not in accordance with law being us law the supreme court is saying that the epa did not follow us law or it has an opportunity to speak again about why greenhouse gases or not pollutants there's been no such movement by the epa there probably will not be any

movement by the epa at least until january of two thousand nine threat to the rule of law as a bureaucrat it's really not enough to begin to think about how federal law impacts your agency or your environment you really have to go to state law and so there was a request to the us not us the kansas attorney general say ok what are our options here do we have the ability then to process this permit with respect to what this new information allows and more important what kansas law allows in the letter n i or ii invite you to go out to our web page at eighties web

page to pull down that that statement from the attorney general we asked whether we could deny or modify or prove a permit and also to delay the decision many of you know all too well that we bureaucrats tend to lean on delay but the delay is a good option sometimes because it creates an opportunity for that space to be filled for new information to be discussed for relationships to be worked out for us to understand the limits as well as the values of the people that we represent of those options that were requested and one that was taken off the table was delayed the opinion said that the statute does not afford you the opportunity to delay so you're back to approve

modify or reject notwithstanding any other provision of the sack a secretary may take such actions as may be necessary to protect the health of kansans or persons or the marmite on receive information that the emission air pollution present a substantial intrusion into the health of persons or to the environment that is awesome based on case a sixty five thirty twelve there's also can say sixty five three thousand five it also allowed us to take action in terms of denying the permit now what i communicate it was not that i believe climate change exists that's really doesn't matter as a bureaucrat what i said is that it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses to climate change and the potential harm to our

environment and health if we do nothing this was not a two year or five year a ten year decision says a forty fifty year decision once these facilities are built they are around for a while so it wasn't a an easy place to get to november twenty eight the kansas supreme court acting because there were appeals filed in fact there were appeals filed in county court and there was an administrative appeal fire file to review or we consider the decision the administrators hearing route is written into kansas law rules and regulations that the decision is thought to be wrong onerous

incomplete you appeal there's also kansas law that provides or forge one the opportunity to appeal in district court supreme court thought it was such a significant issue that it pull all those appeals industry court and to himself some six weeks after the decision very very speedy it measured hearing process was put on hold pending a decision from the supreme court that is the rule of law as we understand it lace lastly we've heard that i'm one of the things that i've been question about often is that i am so what you do with facilities that currently exists say the west our facility out here north of town or order jeffries facility over in topeka what you do with

them and since they already have a permit i've often said we need to sit down and talk with them because we need to try to achieve some voluntary reductions in seal to emissions several weeks ago is in front of a committee and i was asked well what sticky half and you know you really think you needed a stick but we responded that we think that we can have conversations and get to a place where reductions can occur voluntarily well john staff same staff aron radiation staff working very diligently with a star and friday last friday they signed an agreement to voluntarily reduce their carbon dioxide emissions without a stick without inducement without twisting of arms without we think this is the

path that we need to be on as a state until there is a process to get to rules and regulations around seal to reductions in what the levels will be the step every spun it to one of the senators in the meeting that the stick the state that i'm worried about is the federal stick and we'll talk about that just a little bit now what does this agreement do do we write in any reductions know a modified permit would've written in some arbitrary reductions what we asked the facility to do the company to do was analyzed all their facilities come back to us and give us your assessment of what you can do to reduce your zeal to emissions further we want to report their emissions to a climate registry

and we want you to be willing to make some adjustments to your facility or plants if you can do so one of the concerns was well what if we can get reimbursed for those changes to our facilities will as people do when they sit and talk he said well so says like union offer and we don't want for something that you really can't afford or pay for so if that's not possible if you can't get reimbursed you got off ramp will put that on hold but anything below a million dollars that you believe you can do we need you to do that anyway you'll be hearing more if you haven't already about this west are grieving and how this fits into the discussion but a stake is not necessary

leslie wanna talk in this setting in terms of clear about regulatory uncertainty that that's nice phrase it artfully crafted but and our way of thinking there is no regulatory uncertainty we've issued a hundred and seventy one air quality construction operating permits since the operating juvenile timely issuance and since two thousand three january two thousand three we've issued almost twenty nine hundred air quality permits or the same timeframe the only denial was the sunflower permit snapping uncertain about that the only thing i can talk about now is what is already a part of the record and song share some things with you there's a group of folks in the northeast in fact the other states in the northeast have created this group called the we called reggie regional

greenhouse gas initiative they as a group of states are working together looking at climate action plans and policies to try to reduce overall emissions for this region a region includes new york includes massachusetts includes rhode island it includes the big states in the northeast part of the united states bear a goal for seo to reduction as a part of their concern for climate change ej by the year twenty twenty so working can certainly together until the year twenty twenty they thought their goal would probably go for them would be a twelve million ton a year reduction that reggie collaborative affects some forty five million americans this one facility would have just about wiped out eliminate it he raised any of their efforts through the year

twenty twenty there's been conversation about wise to state moving on this now but we wait for the federal government this is an app it's a global issue but at the very least should we wait for the federal government to act in terms of environmental action states have always preceded the federal government acid rain laws first state action in nineteen eighty five federal acid rain program five years later nineteen ninety state air toxic was nineteen eighty seven federal followed in nineteen ninety and nitrous oxide knots trading ninety five federal not state improvement plan two thousand for state mercury rules which are also up for reconsideration

fall staged by some seven years statewide greenhouse gas reductions somewhere abuse as early as two thousand and three federal laws have been introduced again regulatory uncertainty the stick that i mentioned that i'm most fearful of in washington is one that may force may positions states to deal with greenhouse gases in ways that we are not yet prepared most of the legislation in a hundred ten congress there too the law component but one of the most and i'm significant component is reducing emission reduction by sixty to eighty percent below nineteen ninety levels by twenty fifty or were they come out with that all the ipcc as projected how much

carbon carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is possible without irreversible harm on stabilization four hundred and fifty million parts order to depart from that is where that stabilization level is in order to get there this is the glide path eighty percent reduction from her nineteen ninety eight emissions levels by the year twenty fifty there are a lot of bills in congress under consideration for addressing climate change there's the feinstein cap are in theirs mccary snow there's the mccain lieberman bill is the sanders boxer bill on lieberman warner warner lieberman is probably the bill that has most conversation

all it's talking about is a system that caps us emissions puts a limit on all sealed two missions united states so once we have our bucket and were assigned or allocated the amount of emissions anything above that could result in fines fees reduction of federal resources they also restricted transportation dollars in the past or you can also auction off these allocations most of the reggie states have decided to auction those off because i believe that will send the true price signal for carbon our best guess is that the price of carbon per ton will be somewhere between twenty to thirty dollars for time to the net this facility going for letting

her eleven million times at twenty dollars per ton is two hundred and twenty million dollars for the right to operate who pays that cost there are a lot of other things that we've heard that we love to try to clear the air about but again i'm just trying to share with you some of the things that helps too give you a flavor of where we are and where we were going where will we be after all this is said and done whether the decision is overridden whether there's a veto whether there's a veto override it really doesn't matter in the context of this new economy and emily talking about we think of the us grain market has a huge market in fact we have midwest economies that spent a lot of effort trying to be a part of that marketplace but the

carbon market place is already bigger then the us grain economy through training its forecasted that this market will be in the one trillion dollar range annually and that's just the us carbon market says approximately two to a nap times the european car market we're talking about a different environment were talking about a different economic environment that unfortunately we're not ready to play it this cap and trade what i was talking about in terms of capping emissions and either trading the allocations or auctioning the allegations this one trillion dollar figure is based upon that process continuing warner lieberman is probably the bill keep your eye on that's the one that's most legs but before before the cap and trade warner lieberman its not sufficient to get us to where we need to

be in terms of addressing climate change so the wedding when tiger that ok we do warn and women were done and wind all of it is capped emissions of these big plants in and we're ok you me we all going out to look at our footprint for the nafta look at how it is that we reduce the use of energy i'm gonna put on my political hat for just a second bear with me one of the issues that we're concerned about as a nation is energy balance energy and energy and we collect fluid and call a physical activity in much the same way we've gotta come into balance with the energy that we use to drive our economy to get our entertainment to get our education this is a whole different moral folks this is a whole different world the eu has already decided

it's going to be a player no i take that that they're not to be a player than the league they wanna lead the world in this post industrial revolution and that's a low carbon environment economy they say they need new policies to face this new reality germany has decided no more coal plants the whole eu has begun to invest in a super grid that's what's known as a super grid because they know that nuclear france is very well positioned nuclear but coal gas they think that they can get sufficient energy out of the wind and so these transmission lines are establishing a super great because they think that well when does your met some places it's not tenable how to get energy to a place where you need it greg covers the entire continent of europe conceptually so when the

wind isn't blowing and denmark maybe it is in portugal but the move the wind around less cost stability and a leader in this global marketplace is just one example of many china one of the things i heard and we didn't make the top list ok that people still humming away due to china's building a coal fire whenever we yeah they are but they're also spending about ten billion dollars a year on renewable energy technology second only to germany they're doing the old century stuff and they're positioning themselves to be the leader in this new economy we can't allow them to distract us by the use of the old technology we do they could set the standards for equipment for insulation

for motors i'm a southerner heard two weeks ago and share with you gotta blow me away erie pennsylvania is the as the home of the largest train locomotive facility in the united states she is the company that owns the outfit they export more trains to mexico and china and anyone in the world china makes their own trades that thirty percent less costly but these trains from erie pencil eerie new york rappers when you're a new york have lower emissions greater power greater efficiency that's the new economy that we're talking about there's probably some of you in a room who were probably not around or not

even born when some of us knew that men have even touched a surface yet i am in fact some of us remember waking up to see a fall we actually made it to the moon but there is a president who decided that we needed to take that chance back he said by the end of the decade we would have a man on the moon and so he harnessed a nation to go out and do something i'd never been done lot a risk could've fallen flat but he's going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade were to rice university some eight months later to really explain why it was important to go to the moon called a new ocean speech i would encourage you to go a lot brighter of googling it in their local story of librarians in the room but but reading ocean's speech

because it really talks about the need for exploration and why we went to the moon at least in president kennedy's eyes we shall go to the moon and do the other things not because it's easy but because it's hard we sell on this new cd because there's new knowledge to be gained new rights to be one they must be one unused for the progress of all people that's part of the reason why we went to the moon not just get there first just dust and rocks but we are actually on the verge of a similar exploration it's probably the moon shot of our lifetime we need to be successful this is just one such as warren plan this plan will be presented to the

next president incoming president won one point i wanna go back and hit if you don't think that this carbon legislation is coming down the pike i invite you to go to the policy planks of the three remaining front runners in the presidential campaign every single one of them are moving on carbon legislation not to mention boxer senator boxer meza committees already functioning she also has her own bill oh we're really room bills out there so it's going to happen just a matter of time mit apollo alliance are talks about employment that could be derived from an investment in green technology the talks about energy efficiency being able to create art twenty one and a half jobs for every million invested we know where dick creating more jobs and other sources of energy four times as many jobs per megawatt of installed capacity as natural gas and forty percent more jobs than dollar invested in coal these jobs will come

not in the service industry service sector but in the manufacturing sector again there some in the room probably never thought that we'd see growth in the manufacturing sector in this country again but not only is it possible it's doable it's necessary in terms of this new green economy what will this investment look like what might it look like i was thirty billion a year for ten years three point five million jobs one point four trillion dollars to the gdp the one point four trillion is important may also because two trillion dollars is what we spend annually on health care have no that's about fifteen percent of the gdp so you're talking about increasing our gdp by ten twelve percent two hundred eighty four billion in net energy cost savings we could expand

and yet save money that's the new economy climate policy it's something that were all the napa russell where it's not in my domain it is not ink adhd it is not in agriculture it is not in commerce it is not in any single state agency and that is some of what makes this issue so complex it touches on all of this it will impact all of this it needs all of us to be engaged in the conversation and at the end of the day there will be a conversation so if you have been feeling somewhat concerned about what's happening in topeka year you're a little a new song and some are a little stunned by what's happening don't let it take your eye away from what will ultimately

happen and that as kansas will at the end of the day the position as kansas often is a leader a leader nationally and globally we can and we must do this so i hope we're getting enough to think about and i think there's a moderate a question and answer session i hope i didn't dance too much we didn't talk about mark re admissions as part of a regulatory processes are some way that could be have been harassed or was it addressed or we did not talk about mercury in the context of seo to mercury is one of those regulated to emissions in you know one of the things that we could share with you and i don't know that it serves very much purpose but the un the drop permit that we considered for the new facility would have driven mercury emissions down when our

staff did a very good job of holding the company to some very extreme levels and and a company was willing to do them now in terms of mercury missions in the current facility at the current facility for twenty five megawatt facility out in the hogan that's in the top ten top twelve in the nation in terms of emissions that the company's going to do something about that they are working on that we are working with them on doing something about that mercury is nationally any issue because again the epa has chosen not to put in place rules and regulations that are essential to removing as much mercury as is possible and technically possible out of our environment we know the harm the mercury causes and so we can do better i happen to think in kansas with our technical staff with the internal division we are doing better and we will continue to better rather than i'm sure you know that on a per

capita basis kansas has been last fifty states and have an energy efficiency programs either sponsored by or utilities or government but what we have going on to the canal is the legislation to push to promote nuclear power knew watford two pretty badly can you talk about what's their carbon footprint too to build a nuclear power plant and steel and concrete man and how long would it ever take it to work through that footprint so to actually do something for greenhouse gases they are trying to take as much of that as i can about the very first response out i can make is that i am delighted that that permitting process is not ours that would be the gays i don't know the lifecycle cost footprint for carbon for nuclear facility and that's one of the things we began to just take a look at his life cycle crossing guard but in terms of the operating footprint of nuclear is virtually nothing on that one of the reasons why people are wanting to go towards nuclear

energy the point the first mate which is significant is that we have not kansans me all of us have not done a very good job of being more efficient in the energy that we use in fact we can make enormous strides as a state that we can show the nation in terms of reduction abuse by efficiency standards that we no other state or reveal but what it will it take it takes a plan on we have companies who have she munich at it efficiency methods and techniques that there really hasn't been i think an education about the need the desire why it's important if it were to tell my my fifteen year old that it's critical for our environment if you turn out the light every time to leave the room

he'll probably get it if we tell people that those are some of the choices we're going to have to make they will get it kansans are responsive they do what's right so first question the question of the footprint because you know i don't have a lot of posturing efficiency is where we really need to point pursell and yeah it is coming more than likely but if it comes it'll come through the pa and will be cagey you've been listening to ride brandy secretary of the kansas department of health and environment speaking at the dole institute of politics at the university of kansas it was a presentation of the university lecture series at the commons sponsored by the biodiversity institute the spencer museum of art and the whole center for the humanities the recording engineer was lawrence boyish i'm j mcintyre kbr prisons as a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas

i heard those first daughters malia he is next time i get a pr presents we fell a great national poetry month joined at eight o'clock sunday night on camp of public radio where the poetry a hint of poet laureate kidneys lowe who writes about everything from geronimo to be a carriage ordered by general custer's life the sleigh full return his attention to gentilly lake city ut law a second cell secular him home finally for the distance layoffs of slaughter at our present national poetry month with kansas poet laureate to knead flour sunday night at eight o'clock on kansas public radio