Good morning. I am Matthew Continetti director of policy. Thedo american in the price incidents might pleasure to welcome me to this event. 35 years of governmental progress. In 1968 pollen and ehrlich published a the population bomb bomb. Repurpose the idea of 18th century economist to argue that population growth would soon outpace agricultural growth leading tomi widespread famine and other social and ecologicall crises. These ideas to to cold of the embraer American Environmental movement on their planets future. The predictions did not come to pass alarmism over the effect of population growth on the environment as well as a resource scarcity endure at on the left and in recent years the notion that american should stop having children to protect me and environment and was promoted widely by academics journalists and other public figures. According to analysts at Morgan Stanley peers over Climate Change was growing and fertility decline. The environmental and the data on the trend shows we have made progress in nine states and around the world. We are here this earth day to explore what that progress looks like how Environmental Data should shape future Public Policy decisions and how we should ask and answer why we should be optimistic about americas environmental future. Our speakers are Stephen Hayward and roger pielke. From 2002 to 2012 he was a fellow at aei where he authored an environmental report titled the index of leading environmental indicators but the index analyzed and summarized overlooked it on the environment that demonstrate substantial environmental progress over the last generation. St in 2010 stephen published the biblical perspective on human to Natural World on suppositions of the modern and bar metal movement. This mornings discussionwo will expand on many ofnt stephens themes and evidence contained in that work. Today Stephen Hayward is a resident scholar at the university of Southern CaliforniaBerkeley Institute of government study and a fellow of berkeley law and t a professor at pepperdine university. He has written a number of books on the history of the American Movement including the aid of breaking excellent but can patriotism is not enough the arguments that reshaped american conservatism. Dr. Pielke is a nonresident fellow at aei and a professor of college and are of arts and sciences at the university of colorado at boulder. His work on policy with a particular focus on Energy Climate and the politicization of climate. He wrote the honest broker which we are happy to post on the homepage in addition to the subset platform and has authored several books including disasters and Climate Change in the climate thats what they wont tell you about global warming. Stephen hayward will begin with thell y presentation on leading environmental educators. Roger will offer remarks on Climate Change in particular which tends to overshadow other issues in Public Discourse and stephen and roger will discuss what we have learned about the environment and how the Environmental Movement has taken place. Well open the florida audience q a and if you are watching on line in many of you are please submit questions you may have two aei. Org thats guy denton at aei. Org or send a question by x twitter using environmental progress. Without please join me in welcoming Stephen Hayward back to aei . [applause] happy earth day everybody. It used to be a big deal. There often was lot of Media Coverage for it and significant public events. I think the rally on the mall or festival of American Cities on College Campuses and now it passes quietly in there and i apthink lies the tale with a very which comes at the very end as you may be able to guess. The my point is we now have a moment for environmental optimism not just in the United States and wealthy industrial countries increasingly around the world i think. If you cast your mind back to 35 or 40 years ago you may remember every january the state of the world report. It always got a lot of press and of course last year was the chief instigator of this and he was one a of the bakers of environmentalism in the 70s, 80s and 90s. This i is is one report it appointed that got a lot of press and everything is for the world is doomed and mary malfusianer in its outlook and this was reflected in Public Opinion. Back in those days wortham used to do an annual poll every other year in the environment and found large majority of americans thought Environmental Quality in america was getting worse. The roper poll doesnt exist anymore. The next 10 years will be the last decade. We only have 10 years left to do something on environmental discourse which started 54 years ago and we were still here with the tenure countdown. Clearly it was reflected in public consciousness and everyone knows the headlines about everything is and we are all going to die. One of the first markers they think of the beginning of the slow change can be traced back to and i like to start with this, this is an ad from the New York Times from david braugher one of the great figures of environmentalism in the 50s to the 90s. He was a long time head of the sierra club when it changed from being a Conservation Organization to a politically active organization but but this is a fullpage ad in the near time to make it to the headlines economics in the form of brain damage. It has a happy and by the way. What it said was it was a letter to the Clinton Administration please dont use this costbenefit analysis of the reagan and Bush Administration to use to stop all environmental regulation. Not only did the Clinton Administration not take that advice and kept using the costbenefit formula developed during the reagan years when barack obama came in to office in 2009 as head of the radio tori analysis the omb a unit that had been started by aeis previous president back in the reagan years he appointed Cass Sunstein to run a. Cass sunstein is a smart thinker with the idea of the costbenefit analysis. There were some grumbling from environmental groups about that appointment but it got nowhere and then the idea of costbenefit analysis went mainstream. In particular in 2009 they had centerleft and prior mental thinkers. The very serious book saying and i will paraphrase it this way lets not leave costs benefit analysis to those rightwing fanatics. The point is i dont think very many and meyer many and myra meyer once environmentalists today would use that environmentalists and is a form of brain damage. Environmentalism is mainstream. Im tempted to use the doctor johnson lined that famous quote from same toth johnson. It was around that time in the early 90s we woke up one day and saww that William Bennett had made this a great public sensation with an index of indicators produce about 35 pages long simple charts and graphs in time. About all kinds of stuff happening. G. Teenaged pregnancies and welfare dependency and crime rates in Rush Limbaugh picked up on it and it became aru book. Thats when the lightbulb went off in my head. Knowing a bit about statistics in california where he grew up with smog in l. A. I got to thinking the same kind of treatment at the westwood show mostly improvement not on everything a lot of big things. So i thought im just going to copy that format and then for several years as matt mentioned that put out an annual report newbury between 60 and 70 pages. You wanted to have enough substance to ask the say something. He did very well with the media. He was never quite the sensation of bill bennetts report because his report was about drugs and rock n roll in mind was about polychlorinated biphenyls. About that same time i was the only person thinking this. In 1995 he came out with this monumentally large book and the subtitle is the coming age of environmental populism. I think greg was 15 years too early. His book got savaged by environmentalists but for some reason the Environmental Defense fund took such a disliking to debate set up an early web site in the early days of the internet. Factual claims and statistics that could be contested in an error here and there but the sweeping point was the entire book should be discredited. Environmental commentary is so low that few people realize measurable improvements have already been made in almost every area. He just couldnt say that back then are not without attracting widespread its beyond the pale of perspective discourse. Another few years you begin to see the media taking notice and i remember in 2000 after i talked the Editorial Board at usa today they were hidden in plain sight. You can look up the data but of course usa todays format was to have a point and a counterpoint. So they could save things improve that things are still. Lot of them by her take yes for an answer. The other thing at the time that i didnt really think about but the United States still does not have the bureau of environmental statistics to go along with the bureau of statistics the bureau of labor statistics of the bureau of education statistics. Meanwhile almost all of our european nations have the bureau of environmental statistics and reports on trends andd conditions. We have changed the epa round 2006. They now have on their web site and its hard to find things that they ever report on the environmentth that pulls together the data on environmental problems not just the ones under epa jurisdiction other cabinet agencies and other regulatory agencies in the government and the onestop shopping. Nowadays you can download the datasets and analyze them. When i started out 30 years ago i had to go to the epa library in San Francisco and look up reports and numbers in excel spreadsheets the oldfashioned way by hand it now all the data is available for anyone to look at. We still dont have a bureau of environmental statistics are any consistent reporting format. A little story about that for several years a long time present of recommending we ought to have the bureau of environmental statistics and we testified a couple times before on theor House Committee and Government Administration and environmentalists would show up with a new policy idea. I can be about it but one of the persons when they said well we dont trust the administration to do it fairly and straightforwardly. That wasni because it was bush that put out a big report about how massive the Health Benefits of the Clean Air Act were. Apparently this was lost on environmentalism and you can trust the bush omb. He was a tough unrated tree analysis person but thats where we are. The epa started putting out this lovely chart every year which could be summarized under the e heading showing you can have lots of economic growth, population growth vehicle miles traveled and follow conventional air pollution and falling Carbon Monoxide emissions at the same time. Well come to that point because its an important one. Im going to go quickly over few highlights. Today we see the air pollution come to conventional air pollutants of the Clean Air Act era have all fallen well below the National Standard and it sinks lower every so often. Thats not uniform of course for there are pockets like a couple areas of los angeles but when i was a kid growing up in the 70s in the l. A. Area l. A. And im in the San Gabriel Valley two miles from the mountains most of which i can never see. They can see them all the time. In those days we violated the ozone standard. Most of the l. A. Basin doesnt violate the one hour standard even day year again except for a couple of pockets of riverside San Bernardino miss and creative valley. Even on their worst day their peak level of ozone is less than half of what an average day was in los angeles in 1970s. A lot of this is the story of automobiles. Total organic compounds and thats a decline that occurred from the 1970s until now. Id like to point out its really an automobile story. Id like to say the real hero of the Clean Air Act are not so much Environmental Lawyers and judges or the epa issued mandates although theyll play a role but the real heroes were the engineers who are pocket protectors have figured out how to design a compression system for the autos among other things within the same story is true of nitrous and nitrogen oxides emissions and then i can say alive about i could say lot more about the whole conventional air pollution story and power plants in all that stuff but it is true not everything isth improved or things that have improved have stalled out for a long time for the 50s and 70s wewe were in losing a lot of the wetlands and we reverse that by the beginning of the new century and the last two years we backslide it a bit and not all wet lawn wetlands are created equal so there was a subcategory. Another area where we have made no progress at all would be hypoxia in the gulf of which is the story of runoff in the huge Mississippi River basin. Here you can implicate conflicting Environmental Policies and youd likely get the area of hypoxia and nature run off and we are also saying lets have a ton of corn ethanol which is the wrong thing to do if you are trying to control runoff in the mississippi basin. I have some old data showing the general trend of nitrate loading has been going up. A lot of that variation depends on how much rainfall there is a light rainfall year will have less and more well have more nonetheless we are having great progress there. Ill skip over that and shows you the transit than flat on nitrous in the gulf for. Other areas have shown better performance like the chesapeake they Long Island Sound puget sound. Havent looked at puget sound data for quite a wild. See page two here. Another interesting serious environmental analysis happened in 2006 when the ice ice center did the state of the nations ecosystem. This was an extraordinary project involving over 100 scientists of various specialties and of course one problem is what is in ecosystem . We w work hard to define different ecosystems in different scales. They have developed 120 indicators of ecosystems condition and what they found was we only have decent data for about half. The others there were some data but they were so they could only draw conclusions about if you up the conditions they thought were important. And of that 25 of them showed improvement. Others too much uncertainty above all the process of doing this took several years. We hosted Robin Omalley the director from the project at aei along with tom lovejoy from princeton and the other leaders. It was soo laborintensive that they couldnt keep the project open for chile. It an intensive investigation using more of his this environmental studies have matured in the last 20 to 30 years. Other people are starting to get into the game and i think the turning point started with br and lombards book in 2000 i think it came out in 2001 but he was very controversial and you may remember some danish Scientific Committee charged lombard with scientific dishonesty but i read the report and i couldnt find a single factual claimm to disputed but they were claims he could uldispute. And he ended up retracting the finding but it shows you how politicized the matter still was. That was just the beginning. By 2005 Jack Hollander and emeritus from uc berkeley who was a Bobby Kennedy liberal. This began to be a sign that environmental optimism was not only growing that was more bipartisan and wasnt limited to contrary and like ben lautenberg. To talk about environmental progress during his many years here. The one that jumped out at me was seymour guard. The Professor Public Health at the university of pittsburgh and he told the story of how he was a conference oneday Public Health experts and the speaker said well air pollution is his falling almost everywhere and look around. None of us had ever heard this. We didnt believe it. We had never seen it reported anywhere and thats when he decided im going to look into this and similar trends and thats where he came out with a look at the real state of our planet and we had seymour here it aip talk about this book. Whenever a book came out from some exunexpected author would save this book needs attention. Other notable figures a good friend rob who died of years ago to early a good friend here and he is a demographer and covers a lot of the waterfront environment was one of the issues you like to talk about. If youve never seen his gap finder web site he was one a day does designers of mitre this wonderfully interactive site where you can plug into databases from individual countries and countless variables and generate these wonderful animated graphics. Whenever i case