KEXP Presents Mind Over Matters; Sustainability Segment: Terry Tamminen

this is diane warren your host on the sustainability segment of mind over matter is on t x t seattle ninety point three fm and online katy explained out orgy our guest this morning is terri tamminen a special advisor to governor schwarzenegger and former head of the california epa carrie has been an architect of america's most progressive energy independence plans terri tamminen is here today to tell us about his book life's per gallon the true cost of our oil addiction published in two thousand and six by island press welcome terry what led you to write lines for gallon well i've been working on this book for a number of years and of course the last few years in state governments and governor schwarzenegger took office two thousand three a precious little time to work out of for the finish that up and the motivation came over many years of being in the environmental movement reading an environmental foundation and i looked around the landscape of what the environmental challenges are especially going into the future you think of me and to many of my

colleagues that the number one problem we face is our addictions oil and that's because of the documents in the book that it's not only have literally costing of lives per gallon it's costing billions from our treasury it is causing us to do great damage around the world it's harming our politics are everyone's like you are politics and society as well as our wallets and our health and i felt that anything else was really very secondary compared to this and felt compelled to start telling a story and talking about what we can define the shape of the future let's focus now on the lives per gallon aspect what are the implications for human health of using gasoline to power our vehicles well the first of all it's worth noting that what comes out of the tailpipe of most cars and trucks have a remarkable similarity to secondhand tobacco smoke and in the book i

actually well the charges some of the details on that the end of eden and all kinds of other rather nasty toxins are up our poll found in tobacco smoke and then in vehicle exhaust and so you wouldn't be surprised then that word that many of them the harms of the same love of lung cancer and unstable or respiratory to the truth but of course the lives that gallon goes beyond just the health implications it has to do with power the fans of oil around the globe and soldiers dye you have to have third world countries where oil is produced the devastation that it's caused in the wake of developing oil in those countries is over the lives per gallon in many ways are very hard to master how did the toxic emissions from burning fossil fuel off in aa does compare with other sources of toxic emissions well it really runs the gamut because first of all we typically think about air pollution from a burning fossil fuels

cars as being the main source of the way we are literally on the way we create that smart but it actually starts much sooner than that there's a great deal of pollution caused from drilling for oil baby oil rig that i describe in the book are the major sources of sulfur dioxide communities where they are loyal finally learn how to read people live as far as thirty miles down when the refinery are at elevated risk of cancer and other respiratory diseases and of course but many others talked about the drinking water so we just another way as it continues with bp find fuel storage tanks and pipelines which frequently week and again i go into some detail about that book that pollution gets into our drinking water and into our food and then of course finally one of the people there are not only how do we thought we'd and so forth but

sort of that you see coming out for example people thought the particulate matter which is extremely of that is because the very finest particulate matter that comes from that combustion goes deep into the law and not only cause damage in another health care of thousands of thousands of tiny sponges which absorb other country that we're taking deep into our into our bodies in your book you point out that policymakers have been slow to put forward regulations that would protect human health from the toxics generated by gasoline production and combustion even when the adverse health effects and unclear what are the reasons for this one is politics and the other a lot of the politics is pretty easy to understand that i lay out in the book the oil industry have spent about a hundred and eighty six million dollars in the last fifteen years or so on the political campaigns in washington and they've read a thousand dollars in tax benefits and credits

and other subsidies for every one dollar of a campaign contribution and you can imagine they're going to continue to make those kinds of campaign contributions for a long time to come if you get a thousand dollars for revaluing their third suspect he would continue on the other reason was way out of it twenty thirteen general motors firestone tire bent over the pictures which is now out of trouble for a number of other conspirators got together and created what was called the national city lines company shell company for these conspirators to go around and buy up clean electric mass transit and forty five us cities and scrap a clean electric art of rail and replace it with dirty people off of which we live with the legacy of that day and i use that term conspiracy but privately because in nineteen forty seven they were found guilty in federal court of this conspiracy by the truman administration antitrust

violations and other violations unfortunately by then the damage of the garden and in many cases not only have the trains and grab but the train tracks were ripped up and the streets are repaid very often with asphalt that was purchased at taxpayer expense from oil companies and we live with with that legacy of the figure that day and from the nineteen fifties onward has been a pattern and practice of life in the city by big oil and auto industry on everything from high octane fuel lead in gasoline to catalytic converter technology to other things that could have made petroleum products greener and safer and car is cleaner and an advocate for destroying the corporate average fuel economy standards in this country which certainly would have given us more productivity out of fuel and fertilizer that day forward that as well as killing things like the electric car a recent popular movie who killed the electric car

documents that fairly well and i talk about it in the book as well in your book you draw parallels between tobacco companies and that while an auto companies could you explain well that power in practice i mentioned those lines of perception the regulators which makes it impossible for them to do their jobs is very similar to that activity by tobacco companies which if you go to the nineteen fifties under increasing pressure from health officials and regulators with tobacco companies issued what they called a frank statement said ok maybe our products are are harmful but we're going to get all the companies together with the checker competition at the door on this one issue will form the tobacco institute the research of what's happening with our products and make them safe when used as directed records show they did the exact opposite of tobacco company tobacco institute was a front for them to conceal the science of why the regulators and the public while they were killing billions of their best customers the exact same thing happened in the mid nineteen fifties the same time time where not regulators and health officials were

concerned about the effects of small and the auto companies got together and said okay okay we you know will check our competition on the door and this one issue will work together to make sure that what comes out the tailpipe is not harmful to human health and they formed the automobile alliance it turns out you do the exact opposite of what the regulators to conspire to defeat things like catalytic converters and other technologies that would have cleaned up their product significantly and then more recently to destroy or alternatively your emission vehicle battery electric cars they've acted very very similar way and the result of that similar as i mentioned before when you look at the health harms and that the reason that those cell farms are occurring because the same toxins are coming out of the tailpipe or coming out of the center i'm diane warren and we're speaking to terri tamminen former head of the california epa and author of the book lives for a gallon the true cost of our oil addiction one chapter in your book is titled postcards from the year twenty twenty five that gave two very

different visions of an energy future could you describe the two different visions well absolutely if we continue on the path were on with our dependence on fossil fuels over all that in particular in the transportation sector right to suffer a tremendous cost in terms of public health in terms of the dollars we spend on public health which in the book i've documented already some were around sixty seven hundred billion dollars every single year in dealing with the health impacts from roberta trillion and obviously global warming will continue to to get worse and the impacts from that devastation that will cause i read a report the economic impact could be a severe as the great depression so i think my postcard from your twenty twenty five was not that outlandish we are already are a lot of oil by invading other countries killing people that it's only going to be exacerbated in many of those

countries are are fighting back with the people fighting back a nigerian ecuador other places where average citizens have not benefited from oil extraction in their countries so it's a fairly bleak health picture and economic future at alternative postcard is one that much brighter if we shake our oil addiction if we move towards alternative fuels as i talk about in the book if we hold the various corporate conspirators responsible for their behavior towards them as we could with tobacco to invest a small amount of their prophet and alternative energy which were actually help them stay afloat at companies wanted to the future then we can have cleaner healthier the un and much better geopolitics and hopefully fall the growing threat from climate change is this the best solutions to overcoming while we'll hear the couple unintelligible government have to act that

i advocate in the book a legal strategy as you mentioned that would hold the oil and other companies accountable for the apple companies are attorneys general of the various flavor already beginning to file cases in california about six weeks ago our attorney general filed a case against the major automakers to work hold them accountable for the cost all dealing with climate change the victim with reporters for holding them accountable for other costs like health care much what we did with that girl so that's a good step but what were also that sort of the stick and carrot is of course things like again in california is an example of that or we've incentivized significantly the increase of solar panels we've increased that we provided incentives for biofuels like ethanol and evil and where we're accelerating experimentation with fellow africa which is where you take with cutting the other higher social stereotype for example the stock of the court not just the kernel of the court to make ethanol

and working with the harvesting natural gas from landfills and other renewable sources to make if we think of natural gas cars of fueling stations and of course tiger it's taking time for that technology would be effective but in california we have a hydrogen highway where we have already a refueling stations several hundred vehicles thumb and i have a corporate citizens already by two thousand eight ms be given commercially available so there's a lot the government can do that we can force the industry to do but it's also up to us to take action immediately and in the book i talk about ways that no matter what kind of vehicle you drive you can probably get in to fifteen percent better fuel economy literally overnight with a few simple strategies like inflating your tires proper way of driving the speed limit not going to have near eighty miles an hour when the freeway is wide open because that extra ten or fifteen miles an hour and prodigious amount of

fuel more than if you just if a fifty five or sixty a number of other simple strategies and so then you but another car obviously try to get a hybrid or want more fuel efficient models and whatever version you need and then hopefully the other alternatives are available more companies are getting back into the electric car manufacturing and there's already a natural gas cars or biofuel part of the mall and so forth people need to vote with their pocketbooks and then there's another way of voting which is to make sure that when you go into that ballot box if you literally vote but that's one of the highest a litmus test that you put on every political candidate let's go into some more detail about some of the efforts of the state of california to overcome our addiction to oil could you give us the history of zero emission vehicles in california and how that's played out well it was a simple notion by our state air board that that if we had some kind of small but growing percentage of zero emission vehicles on the point that it would then

commercialized technology and over time it would displace the petroleum particles and obviously there wasn't any help from the outer world oil industry and so teare board said look we have to do this because the public health implications of the other costs of doing business on petroleum and so in bank in the early nineteen nineties with them and they pay so that by the year two thousand we should have thought of very small percentage or two or three percent of our cars should be zero mission and they didn't say it had to be better electric or hydrogen or anything else but just zero emission technology where well the car companies immediately started fighting and they've filed suit they lobbied withhold information they use beyond the alliance to put forward false eye and say look you know we can't make zero emission vehicles because of battery electric and the way to do it and there's no batteries that will get enough of a rage for consumers to purchase from and while they were saying that they were buying up companies like robotic and

others who had developed a battery technology and keeping silent or keeping literally lying under oath and they fought a record unfortunately that they want from a battle make a long story short for state regulators lincoln the fate of these challengers and reduce the mandate for a local label significantly and then have a significantly reduced so effectively cutting the zero emission vehicle program you know as we look back on it now with twenty twenty hindsight we know what happened we know that both oil auto industry gamed the system the oil company they documented the book even went to the major utilities in california and said if you support electric cars which many of the utilities were because of course there with electricity to recharge the cars we will take our business elsewhere large refinery power plants and ourselves off the grid you lose your kids and so they'd always even the state's

utilities into and not supporting terror mission could you say more about your evaluation of radiation as an alternative to gasoline will it really have the one technology that hold the hope of flipping the majority of our petroleum or biofuel have great promise but right now they both the ethanol made from corn that that we're going to take a lot of the energy imports throw in fossil fuels off and petroleum fertilizers and things like that and then of course you've got to train them and that was a fairly dirty people combustion to get through the market the west coast or even something useful though it has promise but it is not without problems and the best estimates that we can be for bio fuels of the future are the bigger displays than fifty percent of our petroleum use now that's not insignificant and that's what we continue to support that technology especially the mansion before so it was the cause of all it's not going to solve the problem completely

battery electrics sampling obviously would if everyone overnight from a battery electric car it would it would strain the grid and work currently burning fossil fuels for a lot of our electricity and on the group although a growing percentage of coming from renewables so the one thing that holds the promise of this place you know fifty sixty seventy eighty percent of our petroleum use is hydrogen and the technologies there you can bust hydrogen even in today's internal combustion engines it's not efficient if using a fuel cell but with hybrid technology for example if you if you burn hydrogen in your prius almost a fish and they have a fuel cell in a quarter fuel cell technology that converts hydrogen into electricity so since we're driving an electric car and the only history to that at the moment it's hard to talk about ten times or four hydrogen fuel stack of your source for them and internal combustion engine for a comparably sized car

and of course that's really just a matter of mass production the technology in their own driving a hydrogen fuel cell car unstuck about for the past year democrats were part of a demonstration project and believe me that the technology is certainly ready for prime time could you just the fact that hydrogen takes more energy to produce hydrogen and the unit returns and useful energy to the miracle well there is no free lunch to know whether you're making a battery and putting energy into the creation of that battery or whether you're producing a gallon of gasoline or hydrogen everything takes a certain energy input to get useful energy out right now gasoline on average is about one point five year the energy to produce for everyone usually in the energy bill hydrogen is about one point six to one depending on how you make that equation is rapidly changing because as we have to go farther and farther for oil workers we have to grow deeper to get it that's we have to use more refining to take out impurities as we literally get to the bottom of the petroleum

field and therefore more sulfur and other things to take more and more energy to convert every gallon of petroleum gasoline so the one point six to one from kathleen is actually increasing and some are saying that the future of petroleum given our stand the harsh jail one of which is in canada will be early experiments with that show that you're going to be putting about four units of energy for every one unit of energy on patrol and getting from an energy project that more and more affordable every day hydrogen on the other hand because you can make it from solar energy electro fighting waste water you can take a waste product you can make it from gerry waits for agricultural wastes by about digestion and a number of other ways you can make it for for a positive energy conversion in other words if you take their e waste as an example you can put in a full of a half a unit of energy for every four unit of energy that you get out

so i'd region getting a better energy balance whereas petroleum of imagine it's getting increasingly worse energy it also say a few words about the fact that that hydrogen can be made more locally comparative getting petroleum from far away all that that you can make hydrogen from whatever you have local so if you have to request a lot of hydropower you can use that clean electricity to a draw says water even wastewater to make hydrogen and there's enough hydrogen and a gallon of water to run your card think that goes on a gallon of gasoline tank gallon of water it goes down it carefully and the sewage treatment plants in each city produced more than enough of treated water to power your local transportation fleet in fact in los angeles our sewage treatment plant every day down to the pacific ocean and the original form of waste water to power the entire united states transportation fleet

so that shows you don't really need that much water you need electricity and though that can come from solar oregon come from either power or other increasingly clean sources wind perfect example because wind power is one of those things with us now is below the right candidate for ordinary electricity consumption but at the blows at night for example you can use electricity to break hydrogen out of water and then use that either that the power of what the corporate what they need or for transportation fuel and of course by digestion as i mentioned you can take green waste or agricultural waste or other types of ways to convert that and if that's what you have locally you said a few words about this earlier about how far has the state of california come so far in building a hydrogen infrastructure and helping to commercialize hydrogen will the challenge for often for everyone else have always been the chicken or get no one wants to mass produce vehicles that there is not a robot doing that work and energy companies don't wanna get into building fuel efficient if there are not be able to do that so we created the hydrogen

highway program in california about three years ago and have laid out a blueprint working collaboratively with energy and auto companies and academics say let's make that the tide lifts all boats on a predictable schedule so were building about two hundred stations between now and twenty ten the first heard iraq and operating and that's given confidence to the automakers to start delivering more vehicles we expect to have and thousands between now and twenty ten or twenty fifteen and at that point they will be commercialized unavailable in insurance of course the early models will be a little more expensive early adopters of anything are but we're hoping especially in a place like california that will have enough of those early purchasers to stimulate more mass production and bring the price down for everyone in that timeframe of twenty ten twenty fifteen in your book you discuss legal strategies are lawsuits as a way to bring about change and that while an auto companies when you think the legal system is one of the best ways to bring about change

well it worked with tobacco and as i mentioned before there are so many similarities between oil auto companies and other products and tobacco but secondly because there were documented in the book with a long history of a pattern and practice of live and sleep and eat while an auto companies doing things like that initially appeared to embrace your emission vehicle mandate working behind the killer working behind the scenes to kill catalytic converters despite the face of appearing to embrace from early on things like that so i think the records are a way to force change to leave no ambiguity about what public policy at the end to hold these companies accountable for that kind of despicable behavior and a cough that they're burdening rest of the sweat because in addition to lives per gallon other document in the book all of the subsidies that we give to the oil on auto industry got up to another six or seven dollars and now every time you go to jeff fisher the new pump two or three

dollar a gallon gas probably closer to ten dollars a gallon we're just not paying it all at all what types of legal action do you suggest for making companies pay the true cost of what they are doing in and changing their ways well i'm not a lawyer but i didn't work with words on that from those who have worked on the tobacco cases and i think that model was right there on the tobacco cases and so you might start with something simple common of the many people say to me well terry you know carson and cigarettes are different because every car that everyone smoked them at cards are heavily regulated tobacco is not and that is true but if somebody opens a barbecue restaurant next year hall and the barbecue every night is pouring salt in here open window that may be operating with a permit completely legally but they don't have the right to create incentives that harms your use of enjoyment of your call so you can report what you are operating illegally and destroy my

property are my values and enforce them to you know clean up their their barbecue or the same thing is true here and there that mentioned the attorney general of california has brought the first suit against the fix major automakers and that you know you may be operating legally but your tailpipe emissions are causing the state of california it you're creating climate change and we're spending billions of dollars to respond to the house not to mention the billions of what we have and therefore you should have to compensate faith or upgrading the roads well first of all just the awareness i mean i think people need to understand the true cost but they're paying the fact that while you can walk away from secondhand tobacco smoke you cannot walk away from secondhand tailpipe spoken this country hundred percent of your were breathing contaminated with wheat byproducts of detroit combustion and it's harming us in so many ways and it got and we've got to be part of that by voting our conscience on that by building our

pocketbooks on this and by demanding that our state and other government officials take action of water as well as changing our own personal behavior will thanks so much for being here we have just been speaking with terri tamminen former head of the california epa and author of the book lives for gallantry true cost of our oil addiction published in two thousand and six by island press for more information check on the web add duh da duh da duh the adult lives per gallon dot org again that's lives per gallon dot org you can also check out carries tourists mill site terri tamminen dot com and cameraman is tj am am i any man the sustainability segment of mind over matters program you just heard will be on the streaming archives section of caveats these web site and katie xt doubt orgy for the next fourteen days in addition selected sustainability segment interviews are now available as podcasts good at x p dowd orgy click on podcasting and scroll down to mind over matter sustainability segment i'm

diane warren thanks for listening and be sure to tune into the sustainability segment again next week