Talked about threats at the white house at the Washington Post was reporting on watergate. December 20 third, 1972, about 9 00 p. M. , i reached John Mitchell by phone, about a story we were running. He said he had controlled a secret fund for undercover operations such as watergate. Mitchell was quite upset responding several times as i read him the story. He then proceeded to threaten an important private part of Katharine Grahams anatomy which he said would get caught in a big fat ringer if the post printed the story. He said we are going to do a story on all of you. He hung up the phone. I called ben at home. Woodward and i did much did not much observe the chain of command. Ben interrogated me. Had mitchell been drinking . I could not tell. Did i properly identify myself . Yes. Did i have good notes . Yes. Ok, ben said, put all of mitchells comments in the paper but leave out ms. Grahams tell the desk its ok, he said. A top official of the knicks on Nixon Campaign called me a few minutes later to make an appeal that mitchell had been caught in an unguarded moment. He has been a cabinet member and so forth. He doesnt want to show up in the paper like that. The official then called bradlee at home to repeat the appeal. Bradlee recalled saying which just boils down to this question, whether mr. Mitchell said it or not. Whether the Washington Post reporter identified himself as a reporter, and if he did that all my requisites have been satisfied. Mitchells comments state in the paper. You can see all of this. New years day on the cspan networks, here are some of our featured programs. 10 00 a. M. Eastern, the washington ideas forum, Energy Conservation with david crane. Cake love owner warren brown, an inventor dean kamen. At 4 00 a. M. Eastern, the Brooklyn Historical society hold a conversation. Then, the apollo seven astronaut on the first manned spaceflight. Before noon eastern, author hector on the 33 men buried in a mind. I 3 00 pm eastern, Richard Norton richard smith. Then, a former investigative correspondent for cbs news on her experiences reporting on the obama administration. New years day on American History tv on cspan3 at 10 00 and eastern juanita abernathy. Then, taverns in prerevolutionary new york city. Then, patrick trust 10 president ial caricatures as a historian discusses the president and some of their most memorable qualities. New years day. For our complete schedule, go to cspan. Org. The new congress in january will see the largest house gop majorities in 1920 elections with 247 republicans and republicans take the Senate Majority with 54th beats to 44 with the democrats and two independent to the caucus with the democrats. The oldest member of the house of representatives will be john 85 years old here first elected in 1984. The youngest is the new york republican representative, 30 years old, and elected to her first term this past november. The American Renewable Energy summit was held in colorado earlier this year. Up next, two keynote speakers, we will hear from the author of more than 50 books, shifting from fossil fuels her first term this to solar energy and wind energy. And the fun on animal and plant species that are going in are going a think. Extinct. [applause] thank you, chip. Thank you for organizing are day. Thanks for the invitation to come back again. My topic is the great transition. The great transition is a shift from coal and oil to solar and wind. And most of us know about a Little Solar Energy and a little wind farm there. But things are happening very fast now. I think were going to see about a half century of change compressed into the next decade. And were going to see a complete restructuring of the world Energy Economy. A decade from now, the principal sources of energy in the world will be solar and wind, not coal and oil. So its coming and its coming very fast. Just to give some glimpses of the new Energy Economy that we can now see at various places in the world, last year denmark got 33 of its electricity from wind. In the month of december, it was 55 . It is the first country to get a major share, the major share, of its electricity from wind. But its not finished. The goal is to take it up to 100 . Portugal, spain and ireland are moving fast, with 22 , 18 and 17 of their electricity coming from wind. In spain, interestingly, wind has emerged as the principal source of electricity in the country. And it has overtaken nuclear. In south australia, wind farms are replacing coalfired power plants and doing it very fast. In china, windgenerated electricity has not only overtaken nucleargenerated electricity, but if you look at the curves, the nuclear curve looks like this. The wind curve looks like this. Its just a runaway now. Its exciting to see the other largest economy in the world now moving so fast toward wind. There are seven wind megacomplexes under construction in china. Each of which will have at least 10,000 megawatts of generating capacity. Thats 10 Nuclear Power plants. The largest, which is not surprisingly in mongolia, a particularly windrich air, area, will, when it is completed, have 38,000 megawatts of generating capacity. 38,000 megawatts is equal to the electricity consumption of poland. This is not smalltime, marginal additions to the Worlds Energy supply. This is bigtime. Weve not seen anything like it. And weve not seen any other energy source, including coal and oil and Nuclear Scale up to the levels were seeing with wind, for example, with 10,000megawatt wind farms. Its a whole new ball game. In the United States, iowa and south dakota are the leaders in wind electric generation, each getting about 20 of their electricity from wind. Iowa wants to take this to 50 within the next four years. It may become the first u. S. State where wind becomes the primary source of energy. I should say, of electricity. How is this revolution happened . How has it managed to move so quickly . Incidentally, there was supposed to be a clock here some place, a timer, and i cant where is it . If you can see it, thats fine. The advances have come from Government Policies or indeed r d subsidies, from environmental groups. The sierra club launched, in the beginning of 2010, a beyond Coal Campaign in this country. At that time, we had 530 coalfired power plants. Their goal is to close every one of them. And so far, theyve closed 140. So the 530, now down to 390. Their goal is to close every one not later than 2030. And then we say, well, what about china . Well, china is moving very fast. The coal trusts in china faced with the shrinking use of coal are on the verge of bankruptcy. There are six provinces in china which have set their own coalreduction goals. They range from cuts of 5 to 50 between now and 2020. These are individual provinces simply picking it up and saying basically coal has to go, and were going to do our part. There are also a number of cities around the world who are pushing for 100 clean energy, like san francisco, wellington new zealand, just to set a couple. So a number of cities are setting very Ambitious Goals goals much more ambitious than the goals of the states in which they are located. What about india . India is a major source of carbon emissions, heavily reliant on coal for electricity generation, for example. But its shifting. They have now designed in india solardriven water pumps that are much cheaper than diesel pumps. Indian farmers currently have 26 million dieselpowered is that ten minutes . Oh, good. They have 26 million dieselpowered irrigation pumps. And the plan is to replace every one of them with a solarpowered irrigation pump. And save a lot of money in the process. The payback time on these solarpowered water pumps is from one to four years depending on the situation and depending on the situation and from how far down theyre pumping the water. I mentioned earlier, the scaling up that were seeing with wind farms. Were also seeing the same thing with solar cells. Solar cells can scale up and they can scale down. They can scale down to this little strip on my watch that provides the electricity to run it. And they can go all the way up to 200 megawatts, 200 megawatts. Theres really no limit to the size. And there are close to 100 of these large plants being built now in the southwestern United States. At the end of last year, the world had 139,000 megawatts of solargenerating capacity. Thats equal to 139 Nuclear Power plants. But its growing by an extraordinary rate. Between 30 and 70 per year. One of the most exciting things happening now is actually an Economic Development where rooftop solar panels generating electricity are now producing electricity cheap enough to not only compete with but to undercut the local utility. And what happens in this situation is, as more and more people learn that a rooftop installation of solar panels will provide cheaper electricity than the utility, they begin installing them on their homes. Then for the utility, the market begins to shrink. So they have to raise their prices. And when they raise their prices, even more people put solar collectors on their roofs. And its called a suicide spiral. But there are many utilities now in this country, and elsewhere in the world, particularly in germany, where theyve invested very heavily in solar cells, the two largest utilities in germany are really on their knees. Their net market value for the two of them has dropped 56 over the last four years, which says something about the markets assessment of utilitygenerated mostly coal generated electricity. So the markets are beginning to pick up these changes. In 2013, 33 of denmarks electricity came from wind. In iowa and south dakota, it was 25 . Texas is pushing hard on wind. Last fall, a block of nine midwestern states got 20 of their electricity from wind. The state of oklahoma, in october, got 32 of its electricity from wind. Im getting these examples and these glimpses just so we can begin to see whats happening. I mentioned chinas seven wind complexes. I mean, this is bend generation on Wind Generation on a scale weve never seen before, when you talk about 10,000megawatt plants at a minimum and some going up to 38,000 megawatts. There are four states in north germany that get half of their electricity from solar cells. And then the exciting thing about having a rooftop solar generator is that you cannot only run your household, you can also run your car, with solar energy. Youre going to need an electric car or a plugin hybrid, but theyre coming. And this also is going to be marketdriven and its going to move much faster than people think, for the simple reason that the cost of electricity as a fuel is about onethird that of gasoline. And thats going to become clear, i think, the more and more people in the years immediately ahead clear to more and more people in the years immediately ahead. We have seen an interest for several years now in using corn for ethanol. Im not sure thats the best use of land. If you have an acre of land growing corn, you can produce 1,000 worth of ethanol. But if you put a wind farm on that acre of land, it will generate 300,000 of electricity. So we can begin to see where the balance of where the advantage lies as we look ahead. I mentioned iowa. One sort of wild thing about iowa that reflects the extraordinary piece of agricultural real estate we have in the u. S. Midwest, iowa produces more grain than canada. And at the same time, more soybeans than china. Thats a double wow. But it i mean, u. S. Midwest is why the u. S. Is the food superpower in the world. Theres no other country close to us in terms of production and exports and part of this is the good fortune of having inherited some extraordinarily productive soils. What about Nuclear Power . I have two minutes to go. What about Nuclear Power . Nuclear cannot compete economically. The technology is there. With eknow how to do it we know how haud it, to do it, but the costs are just not there. So its not the technology. Its the economics that has led to the decline in both u. S. Nuclear generation and worldwide nuclear generation. Both are on the way down. Nuclear is on the way out. I dont see anything reversing that. Weve seen a number of things contributing to this transition. One is advancing technologies have lowered the costs of solar and wind energy. Another is mounting public concern about Climate Change that sort of underlies the thinking and the shaping of policies in this area. And weve seen some people with money, a lot of billionaires really begin to plow money into Renewable Energy. Warren buffet. 15 billion a couple years ago. More recently, another 15 billion going into wind and solar development. Oil refineries, a lot of them, theres just not enough demand for oil to keep them going. So a lot of those are also going to be going. Final point. Chevron, exxon mobil and shell invested 120 billion last year in trying to expand oil production. With that 120 billion investment, they only succeeded in preventing further decline. They were not able to increase it at all. The stock market is not looking favorably at the oil companies. The s p 500 index went up 40 last year. Sorry. Over the last three years. Exxonexxon, mobile and chevron went up 11 . Shell went down 2 . When i see the oil ceos now, they dont quite know where to go. Its an entirely new world. Instead of the companies expanding, theyre actually shrinking. Its an indication of the kind of thing that were going to be seeing in the years immediately ahead, and im not talking about 20, 50 years from now. Im talking about the rest of this year and next year. The Energy Transition i call it the great transition because its going from fossil fuels to solar and wind energy will be the defining element of our time. This is a historic development. Thank you very much. [applause] one of the most important developments in modern human history. Now id like to introduce mike phillips. He is one of the gentlemen who have been keeping his pulse on the biodiversity conversation. And mike comes to us from the turner endangered species fund. Im really looking forward to your presentation. Thank you, mike. Right here. Im good. Good morning. Im going to dive right in because 15 minutes is not a lot of time. I caught my first gray wolf 34 years ago. Not long after that thats not supposed to be the first slide. That is. There you go. Ok. Not long after that, i had the good fortune to lead a red wolf to the southeastern United States. This little female, known as 344, was the first red wolf born in the wild in many decades. After that, i had the good fortune in the effort to restore gray wolves to Yellowstone National park. After that, i had the good fortune to saddle up with ted turner and his family to launch what has become the largest private effort in the world to redress the extinction crisis. I wish i could say that well, ive been involved with the extinction crisis since 1980. I wish i could say that i didnt have much to say to today because the work was done, but thats not the case unfortunately, have you ever heard of whipples, or narrow cats paw, tennessee ripple shell, diving beetle, easy yellowfaced bee, true pig toe . All of those are species that have gone extinct in the recent past in the United States. Have you ever heard of martha . Thats martha. Martha was a passenger pigeon. She died at the cincinnati zoo at 1 p. M. On september 1, 1914, at the ripe old age of 29. Martha was not an extraordinary passenger pigeon. She just happened to be the last. Passenger pigeons were fan fanatically gregarious creatures. Consequently, they were very easy to kill. The decline happened fast. In the early part of the 1880s, big flocks, including millions of birds were known. Before the end of that decade, groups of 200 were noteworthy. The last wild bird was shot by a 14yearold boy in ohio on march 24, 1900. After that, the species was only known in captivity. And martha was the last of that crowd. Upon her death, marthas small body was frozen in a block of ice and shipped to the smithsonian. Ironic, isnt it . Billions of passenger pigeons have been killed with no attention to their biology or their anatomy or their ecology. But upon her death, marthas little body was seen as precious, in accord with the scarcity theory of value. Like other extinction crises the one that were currently involved in operates across a massive scale. Every year, thousands of species and attendant interactions finetuned by time and place disappear at the hand of man losses so severe that the redundancy is being stripped away, exhausting the lives of millions. Without doubt, the current extinction crisis is one of humanitys most pressing problems. And on par, on par, with the five great waves of extinction that have swept across this planet since multicellular life first arose a billion years ago. The first extinction crisis occurred in an era about 440 million years ago. That event emptied the oceans. The fifth crisis occurred during an era, about 66 million years ago. During that crisis dinosaurs disappeared in a geologic instant as an asteroid measuring about six miles across slammed into the earth, traveling at 45,000 miles per hour. The sixth great extinction crisis began in the latter part of the 18th century at the onset of the age of man. Like all of these waves of extinction, ours is characterized if you want to define an extinction crisis, its characterized by untold numbers of species disappearing around the world. These arent isolated events. At a rate that greatly exceeds the normal geological rhythms of life and death. During an extinction crisis, all bets are off. The normal darwinianbased rules of survival of the fittest those rules become irrelevant. The change is brought about by these waves of destruction, so fast and so complete that the very notion of darwinian fitness is rendered moot. Speers that survive, this is important, species that survive an extinction crisis are not so adapted as simp