Prosperity. Hes followed by a conversation with peter berkovitz, author of constitutional conservativism. Then on sunday at 6 p. M. Eastern the final two interviews from booktvs recent visit to london. We sat down with authors Anthony Beevor and judith flanders. For a complete schedule visit booktv. Org. Next, michael levi argues instead of viewing our Energy Future as a fight between Clean Renewable Energy and traditional fuel sources, americans should figure out a way to develop both and use the rising prices of the latter as a Funding Source for the former. He spoke at the World Affairs council of houston. This is about an hour. Okay. A couple of weeks ago i actually realize a book. [laughter] not a Financial Statement report, not a printout of a sack of emails, not an industry magazine but an actual book with a hard cover and nice pages. Its actually an enjoyable experience. I suggest you try it sometime. Its entitled the power surge, by dr. Michael levin. Ive had the pleasure of reading a number of pieces, so what i found inside this book was a real surprise. Admittedly, id expected to find cleverlyworded, onesided propaganda thats the hallmark of any debate in our sound bitedriven news cycle. But instead i found nuance and the understanding of complexity. I expected to find be a tax and handpicked anecdotes trying to prove one side of an argument at the expense of the other. Instead i found the appreciation that both sides of an argument can have validity. And nowhere did i detect any type of hidden agenda. I didnt see any cause except to identify what the true nature of the problem is and propose a workable solution. In the world of any highly politicallycharged debate, i think youll agree this is exceedingly rare. I applaud his approach, and i look forward to what he has to say today. Dr. Michael levi is the senior fellow for energy and environment on the council of Foreign Relations and the director of the Councils Program on Energy Security and Climate Change. Hes an expert on arms control and nuclear terrorism. Hes project director for the independent task force on Climate Change cocared by former governors tom vilsack and george pataki. His opeds have appeared in New York Times, washington post, wall street journal, financial times, and his book is even reviewed in this weeks economist. Perhaps most interesting to some of you, he served as a technical consultant to the criticallyacclaimed drama 24. We could probably spend an hour asking questions about that. He holds a bs in path mat call physics and a phd in world studies. Please join me in welcoming michael levi. [applause] thank you for the very kind introduction. Its fantastic to see, fantastic to see such a big crowd here. Apparently, theres some folks in houston who are interested in energy. [laughter] finish i was telling someone earlier i had difficulty choosing exactly what to wear today. While i was writing this book, i picked up some interesting items of clothing. I have now a 50th anniversary opec tie that i still cant find occasion to wear with. I have a beautiful light blue dont frack ohio bandanna that i also decided against wearing if houston. At some point ill try to wear them, maybe not at the same time. [laughter] but ill find some occasion. I want you all to imagine for a moment that this is june 1973, not june 2013. Its been a little more than two years since u. S. Oil production peaked, and youre starting to see gas lines around the country. Its been barely three years since the first earth day marked the beginning of the modern environmental movement. And even though most of you probably arent thinking about the middle east, you will be in a few months when a group of Arab Oil Producers quadruple their prices and set off the 1973 oil crisis. In the next few years, youll see the United States start to respond. Part of that will come from markets. Higher prices for new supplies encourage people to curb demand and persuade innovators to invest in new technologies. Another part of it comes from policy. Barely a month after the crisis begins, Congress Moves forward on a longstalled oil pipeline across alaska. And within a couple years it passes the firstever fuel economy standards requiring more efficient cars and trucks. But if you look a few more years into the future, youll find the country consumed by paralyzing battles. One camp is focused on alternatives and on promoting conservation and efficiency. And the bun thing that the two largely agree on is that the country now has to choose. Energy becomes a focal point in the years that come and peaks in the 1980 election. It becomes so intensely enmeshed in ideological battles that its pretty much impossible to focus on the underlying substance. I did a lot of my Historical Research for this book in the early days of the last president ial campaign, and the parallels were eerie. If you look at the 1980 campaign, ted kennedy describes his opponents Energy Platform as creating a scale of unequal sacrifice based on unfair prices that would bring hardship to ordinary people. David stockman, who is less remembered as the chief architect of Ronald Reagans energy plan that year, calls jimmy carters plan a fight for state control of resources in the economy and describes its proponents as prosecuting their views with a determination befitting the smallness of their minds. [laughter] it shouldnt be a surprise that with energy turned into such a prominent ideological battlefield, while the United States makes some progress, the result is mostly gridlock. By the end of the 1980s, Oil Production has plummeted, access to new resources is becoming more difficult, congress has begun to starve clean energy. The country largely stumbles through the 1980s and 90s with the occasional utility crisis or middle eastern war. But over the last dozen years, energy has reemerged and become central to some of this countrys biggest debates. Just like in the 1970s, the transformation bins with events in the begins with events in the world. Hurricane katrina drama dramatizes the risk of Climate Change. The second thing that happens has excoes of the 1970s too. Driven by markets and policy, American Energy begins to transform in a way that we havent seen for 40 years. A lot of you know the basic trends, but let me recap them for a moment. Natural gas propelled by fracking passes coal as the top domestic source of u. S. Energy in 2011. Last year we see Oil Production rise capping off a fouryear run of increasing protection. Over that same fouryear period, Renewable Energy from wind and solar doubles while prices, particularly for solar, fall. And u. S. Oil cop assumption peaks in the 2005 consumption peaks in 2005 by less driving and improving technology for cars and trucks. But the echoes of the 1970s dont end with changes in the world or in energy. Were also starting to relive some of the paralyzing battles of 1972. You dont need to go that far back to see a time when we could agree on energy. We had Bipartisan Energy legislation in 2005 and 2007. In 2008 john mccain and barack obama fought over whose cap and trade program was better. In 2010 president obama moved against the interests of some of his allies to expand leasing in order to increase production of offshore oil and gas. You dont hear much about these sorts of things today. Instead you hear about how the keystone xl pipeline will be game over for the planet or how blocking it will be a body blow to National Security. You hear about how it will create millions of jobs and provide a replacement for oil. You hear how Government Support fur Clean Energy Innovation will propole the United States t to propel the United States to Global Leadership or how pro profligate Government Spending how badly washington is adrift. Now, this is a hugely frustrating state of affairs. Here you have in the span of barely five years changes in American Energy that are more radical than at any time in almost half a century in ways that have big consequences for everything from the future of our economy to the health of our environment to our position in the world. And instead of using this as an opportunity to rethink how we approach energy and take advantage of the changes that are underway, were mostly grasping at old ways of thinking and settling back into destructive debates over what to do. Its that mixed sense of opportunity and increasing frustration together, to be quite honest, with great fascination about whats happening and its consequences that motivated me to write this book. I tried to do three things with the book. The first thing i wanted to do was tell the story of whats happening in American Energy. Many of you focus on International Issues like i do, so when you want to understand something, you end up in moscow, beijing or london. And i did that, but i also spent time in pennsylvania and colorado and ohio and detroit trying to understand whats happening on the ground. People in houston are intimately familiar with the oil and gas industry. A lot of places where the country is being transformed are not so familiar, and one of those places that i visited while i was with writing the book was in southern ohio, Athens County about fracking. The first person i met was warren taylor. He owned snow bell creamery. Ive actually watched him speak at the antifracking rally in columbus where i picked up that bandanna that i told you about before. And warren told me a story. He said my parents bought woodland property down here in the 1960s. Beautiful, not a virgin forest, but a damaged world war ii vet hadnt allowed any logging. So by the 1960s, unlike most places around here, this was a beautiful woods. Taylor had moved away and then moved back and bought property next door. And he said to me, that property had won a blue ribbon at the county fair for the finest corn bottle in the county. Two years later the neighbor strip mined his place and the runoff from the high walls destroyed the 640acre farm. Then he says to me, a guy who has a ph. D. From Ohio University concluded it would be a thousand years before it would return to what it had been before. You do the Economic Analysis for me, he says, on a thousand years of corn versus one year of coal. Now, while i was talking to warren taylor, bill dicks drove can up. Bill is a dairy farmer. Bill and warren are friends. But one of the big differences between them is that dicks opens land and taylor doesnt. And bill dicks says to me, the opponents are hypocrites. Theyre happy to profit when their Pension Funds invest in exxonmobil and chesapeake but unwilling to accept developments in their backyards. He says theyre worried about the athens way of life when the barbarians are at the door. The rural men arent working, the kids dont have fathers, theres heroin. The par barrens are at the fing gate and youre worried about having to seeing oil rigs when youre taking a sunday night drive . Again and again as you visit the places newly transformed by changes in American Energy, you see this mix of excitement and fear. So this is the first thing i tried to do with the book is give a sense of whats happening around the country whether its fights over oil and Gas Development or challenges facing Clean Energy Entrepreneurs or decisions made about what cars to produce in detroit. The second thing i tried to do was understand and explain what the changes were seeing in energy mean for the big things people care about, the economy, jobs, National Security, the environment, Climate Change. Will the United States become Energy Independent . What will changes in American Energy mean for our relationships with russia, china and the middle east . What can natural gas do and not do when it comes to combating Climate Change . How much stock should we mutt in promise put in promises of millions of new jobs . And one of the themes that comes through again and again is that we really are stuck in the past. I want to take just one example, Energy Independence. For 40 years president s have promised to deliver Energy Independence, and for 40 years they failed. And now you cant go a month without a new report claiming at least north america will be energy selfsufficient within a decade or so. But i argue in the book that this wont actually make up independent in a meaningful sense of the word. In the last 40 years, as you know well, weve developed Global Markets for oil that have made where we get our energy from far less important than it used to be. When civil war broke out in libya two years ago, the price of oil produced in the United States, of course, increased by as much as the price of oil increased in the middle east, and the economic damage to American Consumers was the same. That would not have been the case 40 years ago, but it is the case today, and it will be in the future. So while rising Oil Production is good for the economy and benefits National Security, all areas that i explore, it wont deliver Energy Independence because the world has changed. So thats the second reason i wrote the book, to explore and explain how energy will and wont affect everything from the economy to security to the environment given the way the world is today. And Energy Independence is just one piece of that larger puzzle. The third reason i wrote the book, and every author has his motivation s that i wanted to make a point. I argue in the book that the claims you hear about how we need to decisively pick sides, that the real opportunities lie only in oil and gas or only in clean energy and efficient cars and that the other side is mostly downside arent just wrong, but dangerous. I make the case for what i call a most of the above approach to American Energy that doesnt blindly embrace everything but that adopts a broad portfolio. Im not going to take you step by step through the argument, but i want to flag three big reasons why im afraid that well fail to seize many of the opportunities we have. The first is that i worry that we wont get fracking right. There are smart ways to do development, and there are dumb ways to do it. And if we do it the wrong way, we will only have local problems, and we could see a backlash that prevents us from taking advantage of some of the opportunities that we now have. And when i was writing the book, i visited with the mayor of youngstown, ohio, who told me about how he had sponsored ordnances to support increased oil and Gas Development, and he was excited that a new plant was about to open in youngstown to make steel tubes for the industry. But he also told me about what happened when one company did a sloppy job of wastewater disposal and set off a 4. 0magnitude tremor. His house was damaged, and he told me two things that stuck with me. He said you get a pot of gold, but if youve got earthquakes, people dont want the pot of gold thats causing the earthquakes, because if they wanted earthquakes, theyd have moved to california. [laughter] the second thing he said to me was i used to be a teacher. I used to tell the kids dont bs me. If you know the answer, good. If you dont know the answer, just say i dont know it. Nobody knows everything. I think thats a really good message for people who want to see development succeed, and i count myself among that group. Theres a good story to tell about how oil and Gas Development can be done well with the right practices and the right rules to make sure theyre follows, but we see a bit too much confidence and too much certainty and not enough humility on too many occasions, and people dont trust that. The second thing i worry about is that well get lazy. Its really tempting to say you know what . Climate change, really tough problem, and natural gas is already cutting our emissions. Cant we focus on Something Else . And its really easy to say people dont love fuel economy rules, they dont really like it when government spends money trying to promote new cars and trucks, and booming Oil Production is going to end our dependence on foreign oil anyhow. And that would be a real shame. Because as i argue in the book, cheap natural gas and falling prices for Renewable Energy have made it less expensive to curb Greenhouse Gas emissions. Transformations in o