As somebody with your viewpoint and seeing things all across the country, other any examples that are evolving that we can look at as an example of progress or success that we can look at and kind of understand, where is the hope in all of that. A great question. There is another great movie coming out, wont back down. You have a teacher and parent schools. If real important. Superman, i know all the sought, i needed to know whati found out she did get into school. Florida is a good model. Jeb bush is on another side of but he did a good job of forcing florida schools accountability. Right now, several years later, the africanamerican kids test scores in florida are on par with white kids in the rest of the country. By putting accountability in and giving some examples of opportunities for choice, he created an environment for these kids who are far behind and are now moving forward. Some of the stuff done in new york was amazing, particularly the agree the principals academy, where he had a goal to get some of these strong principals to get into management sessions. He had a pipeline of them. Those teachers put pressure on the traditional teaching pool to be better. The models are there. Like it or not, most of education will be driven by state agendas. That is why the work you are doing here is so important. The state leaders have to be responsive to this issue. They need to put these kids first. We get them to do that, and we can change this. Thank you. [applause] this is our custom, so you can write down your next speech. [laughter] you can enjoy a glass of wine. Do you have a corkscrew . [laughter] [applause] and, cut. [laughter] a look at their primetime schedules of the cspan networks. Senior democratic and republican strategist analyze the 2012 election. Cspan 2, a new stage of like discussion for baby boomers and what it means for employment and entitlement policy. Cspan 3 a look at the u. S. Pretences them and budgetary concerns. All of these that it oclock eastern on the cspan networks. Here on cspan, a program from atlantic magazine. And reached water talks about her cover story on the topic. That is that 9 00 eastern. At 9 35 eastern. Go and find your soldiers and the labor market. The villages and towns of america. We did that. Over five or six years we created an absolutely splendid force of young men and women willing to serve their country as volunteers. They had the same tradition, the same culture, loyalty and dedication of any other generation of americans that have ever gone before. They proved themselves in the gulf war, panama invasion, and iraq st 10 years anin and get a stand. We it to keep in mind is something prado begin said president lincoln said. It means never forget they are carrying the american spirit, the american traditions with them. When they get injured, when they get hurt, or when they come back to be reintegrated into society, we need to be waiting to care for them. Not just the federal government, the veterans administration, fellow citizens. More about the rich the treatment of returning veterans sunday thanksgiving day at 8 00 eastern. Later, space pioneers and nasa officials pay homage to the first man to walk on the moon, neil armstrong, just before 0 00. 11 00. Next up, a discussion on u. S. Energy policy and the energy grid. Spotlighthis weeks focus on the Jeffrey Leonard piece on the future of natural gas and the challenges of an aging electrical grid. Jeffrey leonard, start with the first half of this equation and explain what you mean when you say that the natural gas boom could be the biggest game changer in Global Politics and economics in a generation. Guest things have changed so fast in the Energy Picture in the United States. A few years ago it seemed that we would need to import large amounts from abroad in order to meet our natural gas supply in this country. Today there is so much gas available and more projected to become available in this country that it is creating opportunities for Electricity Generation for gas, creating opportunities for industries to go back to the United States. Chemical, fertilizers, adding large amounts of money back into the economy. The Energy Picture looks a lot different than it did a few years ago. Host this natural gas boom that we have, why do you say we are in danger of blowing it . Guest there was a large amount of investment made in recent years to extract that gas. We are looking at different ways of using it. Both the price and supply in the long term may be more constrained. Guest host you also argue the problem of the aging energy trend. Guest is the transition to gas. This year a large portion of the Energy Produced in the United States, almost 50 is going to be produced by natural gas. A big change. A longterm evolution that we have been going through. Coalfired plants have been taken off line this year in record numbers. That has been made up by more utilization of existing natural gas plants. That is a good thing for the grid, it creates a lot of flexibility. The challenge that we have, as anyone living in the eastern part of the United States has recognized, is that the grid itself is very susceptible to storms and other kinds of power interruptions and catastrophic outages, such as cascading electricity blackouts, or even things like cyber terrorism. Host what would it cost to protect the grid against all of these different threats that you just ran through . Guest part of it is not so much what it would cost, as much of it is done over the course of routine maintenance. We simply have not made the reinvestment in the grid over many years. In the last few years there have been Regulatory Initiatives by the federal Energy Commission to try to enable utilities to be able to recover the cost of their investments in their rate base. That is a positive longterm trend. Like health care, we can either pay for it through preventive maintenance or at the end, when we have catastrophic outages. Host the Current System dates back to the 18 eighties. 673 billion in investment was needed by 2011, annual increase over current investment. Service interruptions are projected to cost about 197 billion by 2020. If you want to join in on this segment and talk to Jeffrey Leonard, give us a ring. The phone numbers of their on your screen. We would certainly love to hear from you and chat about your questions. Jeffrey leonard, a question of the natural gas boom, is there a danger of defending too much of natural gas . You talk about the last gasp of a naturalto gas in the 1990s. Na natural dash to gas in the 1990s. Guest by the end of the decade, prices had gone up by 2. 5 times because supply was in short order. Many utilities fell burned by that and now they are cautious. If you speak to industry executives, they will say that gas is great and has been cheap and is cheap now, but was cheaper before. They need longterm short contracts for the delivery of gas at certain prices in order to build new power plants depending only on gas. Host fracturing is an issue that causes a lot of emotions for folks on both sides. This from tehran on twitter darryl on twitter host can you talk about the Environmental Concerns out there . Guest let me say a bit, i am not an expert in that area but i am an environmentalist and all my career i have been involved in the community. We have a lot of natural gas in this country. Fracking is part of the issue, but not the whole thing. It is a dual concern. On the one hand, the economy is booming. People are finding the ability to lease their land and new employment is being created. On the other hand, people are scared and concerned of the environmental and other consequences. That thing leakage at the sites, there are many Environmental Issues raised. First of all, the techniques need to be regulated. We need to understand that the chemicals being utilized here, that our supplies are protected and so on. In general most experts believe that if we do this responsibly, we can do it without reducing dramatically the amount of gas available. Without making absolutely sure that the truth out buyers in terms of environmental practices are regulated. Host we are speaking to Jeffrey Leonard, the author of the peace in washington monthly. How we could blow the gas boom, that is the peace excuse me, how we could blow the energy boom. Chairman of the washington month the board of directors, Jeffrey Leonard, is with us. John is next from grosse pointe, michigan. Good morning. Caller i hope that you are having a good thanksgiving and please pray for our lions tomorrow. This is a good subject. Natural gas is going to be with us, they will have to make it as safe as possible, the way that they extract it. The problem was going to be nuclear. It was completely a debacle. It diverted to natural gas. This was in california. It seems like natural gas was the obvious way to run energy in this country. Thinking about the poll that snapped because of Hurricane Sandy in the new jersey area along a coast, they underestimated things like that. So, the broader issue is how does it work . Who controls the rebuilding of our infrastructure . Would it be wise to put money into these tubes these individual utilities . Host first of all, i wrote this piece. We were sort of talking about it. Anyone looking at the big Energy Picture, not the individual pieces of energy, we spent all of our time talking about oil, gas, and nuclear. We debated about the environmentalists in the business community. We started to realize that, first of all, most americans get their energy from electricity. The change from this energy boom that we had of extracting record amounts of gas from the ground to plug in our homes, that really needs to it is the point that you raised about infrastructure. It is about investment in what we already have. About making the natural gas exploration, collection, and Distribution System safe. That was a big concern by the last president , who did not have to worry about an Energy CrisisLyndon Johnson, before richard nixon. In 1955 he said we had two Critical Infrastructure pieces. One, makes a the natural gas supply chain, the other is the electricity grid. We have not invested enough capital into those infrastructure areas. Host fred, denver, colorado. Your on with Jeffrey Leonard. Caller code does the improved technology caller does the improved technology of shale extraction make to the Keystone Pipeline obsolete . Make the Keystone Pipeline obsolete . Guest i am not an expert in that area. I wish i was. We will be conducting natural gas movements in this country, moving into new england. Where we have depended on fossil fuels for energy supply. I do not know the answer on that. I think that there is a lot of Energy Around this continent, like canada and the United States. I would have to study that more to give a real answer. Host twitter, comparing natural gas to others out there host also, karl writes in on twitter guest let me start with the renewable question. We should not be setting of renewable and natural gas against each other in the Energy Suppliers of the future. We need natural gas on the grid because we do not have storage on the grid. Coalfired plants, nuclear plants, the big load of plants in this country cannot fire up and fired down easily. Therefore, because of renewable energy, those are not based load power. They cannot deliver, 365, a measurable amount of electricity. You need natural gas in the middle of that. Many are talking about the need of the Energy Department and others to spend billions on new storage facilities. Maybe in the long term they will come along when needed, but right now the most valuable up and down the hillside is up and down natural gas. We can only have more, and greater amounts of renewables, if we have greater amounts of natural gas as a substitute. You wanted to do extraction . I do not know the job count. I know that we are creating a lot of jobs across this country. There is a lot of exploration in oil coming up, which is obviously one of the reasons that gasoline prices may be falling, somewhat. I do not know the answer to that. Since 1950 we have been gradually reducing our dependence on coal. That is a gradual economic transition that happens everywhere. If you look at your up, in my youth, in london people were dying from coleslaw because of the tremendous coal smog because of the tremendous amount that they used in england. Host david, good morning. Caller i wanted to say happy thanksgiving to you early. Can i say that i think that it is wrong to bring up the presidency of Lyndon Johnson . Most people back and did not have more than a television and a refrigerator, maybe some heat. That just does not compare to the energy needs of today. For my comment, what i wanted to say was with the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to create a full infrastructure, would it not be less expensive, with higher yields, and better continuity if each home just created its own energy . If we removed the need of an for an all or nothing grid in this country and the investment would be back into the homes rather than the country . You have raised guest you have raised all the different sides of the concerns i have wrestled with for years. You are right to say that in the age of Lyndon Johnson, we used far less electricity. Your home today has 24 devices, 42 light bulbs, and countless other machines, like microwaves and so on, all of them running on electricity. While some use less than others, we use a lot of electricity. Something like 45 of all homeowners leave the television on in the day time for their dogs and cats. We have become prolific users of electricity. If we lived in the age of Lyndon Johnson or before world war ii, we might have the technology to put natural gas in someones home and they could use that to generate a small amount of electricity for themselves. The reality today is that we are not going to be going back to a point where everyone can generate their own electricity on a costeffective basis for quite some time. Those technologies that may come in the form of many other possibilities, hydrogen in the longterm. But today here and now we are dependent. If we can invest in the grid and make a grid smarter, using systems to manage our grid better, we can have much more ability to use micro review and smaller units and not have such a large interlinked bread where they are transmitted thousands of miles. Host profits are up, why does the private sector expect taxpayers to foot the bill she writes nationalize it. Guest the reality is that we do not need taxpayers to modernize the grid, the electricity industry has become the lowest of all industries in terms of reinvesting for research and development and new infrastructure on an annualized basis. I do not know if anyone heard the advertisement that the Railroad Industry is running. They said we were going to spend 23 million in reinvesting the Freight Railroad for the future. I started thinking about that. The freight Railroad Industry is much smaller than the electricity industry. Utilities spend about 10 billion in reinvestment. We need a Regulatory Initiative to allow the utilities to recover the investments that they make in bonafide, longterm investments to the grid. Yes, they will have to pay, but i think of what weve discovered with Hurricane Sandy is that consumers and taxpayers are going to pay through the nose if we just wait for disasters to occur. We need to reinvest in the grid. It does not have to be taxpayers, but will it will be a slow and longterm amortization through our electricity bills. Host how does that affect your work at the Global Environment fund . The Growth Capital investment Oriented Fund you are part of them of guest our primary focus is on efficiency. Part of . Guest our primary focus is on efficiency. From an excess of user energy to using it more efficiently, lets take a few statistics. The Japanese Industries will use far less per unit of output than in the United States. Because the electricity has been higher price, they have adapted technology and industry has had to use technology that is far more efficient. Much of our investment is on the efficiency area. We lose a lot of electricity between the point of generation and the point of view. Ha ha we think, and i think in general that the longterm trend in the economy is toward greater efficiency. That is where i would like my investment dollars. Host tom, you are on with jeffrey, who wrote this story in this months washington monthly. Guest two issues that i want to speak about. I will give you caller two issues i want to speak about. First, Drinking Water not been contaminated by the fraction process fracking process, this is nothing new. I had a friend who had a farm, 25 or 30 years ago he had a problem with the gas company having drill a hole in one of his pastures, contaminating the whole farm and its Drinking Water supply. This is not a brand new issue. This question of allowing these Power Companies to under fund the maintenance of their system, the rush to profitability in our generation is really astounding. The maintenance of their system, we are all