Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our ongoing conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. Today we’re talking about one of the most urgent questions there is for the future certainly of our planet earth and the societies who live on it.

Today we have someone who has built a little bit of a reputation as a troublemaker. When he’s not out protesting the power plant that supplies Capitol Hill, Mike Tidwell can be found talking with church groups about climate change, writing another book about the environmental dangers that are threatening our planet. Mike is the founder and director of Chesapeake Climate Action Network, a grassroots organization raising awareness about global warming, particularly in our area. He’s also an author and filmmaker whose award-winning film, “We Are All Smith Islanders,” highlighted the way that climate change is affecting traditional ways of life along the Chesapeake Bay.

Mike, it is great to have you with us today.

Mike Tidwell: Thank you so much for having me.

Lloyd: We’ve been hearing a good bit lately about the economy, but on Thursday in the Washington Post, there was a major front-page headline that said, “Eco Bills Come Due at Bay’s Beaches.” The gist was that the water level in the Chesapeake Bay are rising faster that anyone predicted, and almost twice as fast as anywhere else in the world. What’s going on here?

Tidwell: Well, you know when… First of all, thank you so much for coming today, and it’s so wonderful to be in this great place, this holy and wonderful place.

In terms of climate change, you know, a lot of people have trouble understanding global warming because it’s global, it’s big you know. How am I going to be affected? Where do I see it, you know? And we in the Chesapeake region happen to be exceptionally vulnerable. We think of New Orleans and South Louisiana as being very vulnerable: it’s low-lying, it’s prone to hurricanes, The exact same is true of Maryland. We are basically a water state; we have 3,100 miles of tidal shoreline. That means that 3,100 miles of our shoreline is affected by sea level rise.

If you get a foot of sea level rise worldwide, you get a foot of sea level rise within the entire coast of Maryland, including downtown D.C., where the Potomac River is a tidal river. So we are exceptionally vulnerable to sea level rise and to larger hurricanes.

As the Washington Post article mentioned on Thursday, sea level rise from melting glaciers, from global warming induced by human activity is increasing, the ocean itself is warming, and as water gets warmer, it literally expands in volume. It’s called thermal expansion. And these are already happening, and it’s happening in our region and how we feeling it, seeing it… well, according to the Washington Post article, we have cemeteries along the coast of Maryland that are disappearing, we have entire communities with the word beach in their name, like Manhattan Beach neighborhood outside of Annapolis that no longer has a beach.

And the Washington Post surveyed all these communities on the coast of Maryland with the word beach in them and found that most of them no longer have sandy strips of beach. It’s all bulkheading now because of sea level rise.

And then on top of the sea level rise that we’re seeing, hurricanes are getting bigger in the Atlantic.

This is not just the scientists that are saying it. It’s not just the academics. Allstate Insurance Company right now will not provide any new homeowner insurance in eleven of Maryland’s coastal counties. So Allstate Insurance Company is already retreating from the coast of Maryland and Virginia, explicitly, according to Allstate, because of global warming–induced larger hurricanes. So this is real, it’s now, it affects us and now we have to do something about it.

Lloyd: Are you sensing with hurricanes themselves that there’re going to be more of them and larger? Why do you… We haven’t even heard a whole lot of hurricanes in recent years, it seem to be going in other places. Is this a place that is particularly vulnerable forth coming in this direction?

Tidwell: What the scientific community has determined and what Allstate and Liberty Mutual and State Farm are all responding to is the data that is showing an uptick in hurricane activity in the mid-Atlantic. Now we’re pretty far north, so we don’t get as many hurricane as, let’s say, Florida. A third of all hurricanes that hit the United States pass through Florida. They have a serious problem there.

But hurricanes do come here. We remember Isabel in 2003, which caused a huge amount of damage in this region. Hurricanes do make it this far north, and what the scientists are finding is that the biggest hurricanes, the major hurricanes, the category 3, 4, and 5 hurricanes, are becoming more frequent and will continue to become more frequent in the mid-Atlantic because of the warming sea surface temperatures.

Warm water is the fuel for hurricanes, and we’re not immune to that. As water gets warmer in the mid-Atlantic, we will see bigger hurricanes.

Lloyd: You wrote a book called The Ravaging Tides: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities. That’s a pretty ominous title. Tell us how you see some of that beginning to happen. Hurricanes are one part of it, but you’re talking about the death of coastal cities. What’s all that about?

Tidwell: Well, the title was invented by the publisher who wanted to really make the dramatic point that if you predict something really bad, then perhaps the prediction itself will motivate people to act in a way such that the prediction never comes true. But we are seeing… Again, you look at New Orleans. I mean, that is a city that’s in a lot of… it’s in bad shape. And we saw this coming, we saw Katrina coming.

I wrote a book in 2003 called Bayou Farewell: the Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast. It sounds like I wrote it after Katrina, I wrote it two and a half years before Katrina, because those of us who are paying attention to these coastal communities could see that Katrina was coming because, again, South Louisiana is low-lying, flat, flat, flat, like the Bangladesh of America. Hurricanes were getting bigger. It was a very vulnerable community. New Orleans is mostly below sea level, and now we are all New Orleanians.

Now that climate change is a reality, now that the National Academy of Sciences here in Washington said that it’s happening now. The intergovernmental panel on climate change, which just won a Nobel Peace Prize, is predicting these things. We must come to terms with the fact that those of us in Washington, in Virginia, in Maryland, we are all New Orleanians. We are all subject to the impacts of climate change, and it’s not maybe kind of sort of computer modeling in the future.

It’s here now.

Allstate Insurance Company is retreating from our state now. Insurance rates are getting more expensive now. Communities are eroding now, and if we want to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we want to avoid another Katrina in our region, we need to act—not just on fear. I mean, fear can be a motivator, but I try not to just make people afraid—

Lloyd: You’re doing a good job of it, though.

Tidwell: —but, as I know we will in this conversation start talking about what a clean energy economy will do that’s good for us, and that’s a lot.

Lloyd: The Potomac River—tell us what you worry about, say short of a hurricane, what are your worries about water levels on the rise, and then what would be the impact of a hurricane coming up to Potomac River?

Tidwell: Well, the Potomac River, again, is a tidal river. We have tides right here in the river, you know, up until Chain Bridge. And so, if we get a foot of sea level rise worldwide we’re going to get a foot of Potomac River rise in downtown Washington. If we get ten feet worldwide, we get ten feet in downtown Washington. Imagine that! This is an issue that affects Washingtonians, it affects Northern Virginians, Marylanders. You know, it affects everything. You change the climate and you change everything.

If you change the climate, you change your destiny.

The current climate that we live in, we had what scientists call a ten-thousand-year summer. The weather that you and I were born into, where it gets hot in the summer, cool in the fall, cold in the winter, and spring comes back and warms us again, with all the blooming flowers, etc., that basic climate system here that we have in North America is about ten thousand years old. A similar stable climate system has been here for ten thousand years, the one that Shakespeare lived in, that Jesus Christ lived in. Ten thousand years of stable weather called the Holocene.

We are changing that through human activity, through the burning of oil, coal and natural gas. And if you change your climate, you change everything.

Human civilization is almost exactly the same age as this current climate epoch that we live in. So if we change this, we change everything, and nobody will be immune. We will change everything in Washington, D.C.

My son and I love to fish for shad in the spring in the Potomac River, right at Fletcher’s Boat House. And this is an ecosystem of these anadromous fish that hatch in the Potomac River then migrate all the way to the Atlantic, then come back to reproduce right here in the Potomac River. And every spring my son and I go and we fish, we join the birds and all the other animals that go to feed on these fish.

And I’ve told my son, if—he’s eleven years old—if, when you’re my age, you can take your son to Fletcher’s Boat House in Washington, D.C., to catch the migrating shad in April, then we will have done our job. The point being that everything will change—the migration of fish, bird, our lives, economic reality for us, everything will change if we don’t stop this climate change. If we do stabilize the climate we will have prosperity, we will have more peace, we will have children who go fishing in the Potomac River.

Lloyd: Let me ask you just because it has surfaced in the newspapers, conversations the last couple of weeks, some continual questioning that comes up about the reliability of the alarm of a global climate change. I think recently there’s been an exchange between George Will raising major questions about the science itself, arguing, with Al Gore arguing the other side, a sense that we have lined up two competing sets of scientist about this. What’s your sense of that particular discussion and how credible the evidence is for the frightening scenario that you’re describing?

Tidwell: The science is settled, period! The science is settled.

The planet is warming rapidly. Human beings are driving at through the use of oil, coal and natural gas.

If you don’t believe that then you are in disagreement with former President George W. Bush. President Bush’s own agencies, the White House itself in his State of the Union address in 2006 [and that’s where] George Bush… on George Bush last day in office, his administration released a report saying sea level rise is happening faster in the mid-Atlantic because of global warming than anyone thought possible even five years ago.

So anyone who says science is not settled is in disagreement with George Bush. Anyone who says that science is not settled is in disagreement with Allstate Insurance Company. The last time I checked, Allstate Insurance Company is not a Republican corporation. They’re not a Democratic corporation. They are a private corporation with their own private capital at risk and as they read the science. As they measure the sea level rise, as they see the storms, they are retreating from our state.

The idea that it’s not happening is simply a fringe belief of people who frankly will probably will never change their point of view.

You know, George Will doesn’t have problem with science. You know, frankly, George Will believes in evolution. He argues with other conservatives that the science is solid, that evolution is a reality. It’s not that George Will doesn’t have problems with basic science.

George Will, being a conservative, has a problem with science when the result of that science might lead to bigger government. And so, when global warming science says there’s a real problem, and human beings need to get off of carbon fuels and onto alternatives like wind, solar, and efficiency, and it might involve some government price signals imposed on markets, that’s when George Will tends to start to have problems with the science.

I frankly believe that he’s clouding his political view with the scientific reality, and I would encourage George Will, and anyone who thinks the science isn’t settled, to go talk to the insurance companies who say this.

Don’t talk to me, I mean, they can dismiss me as an advocate as someone who’s… you know, has a basic agenda. I would encourage them to go talk to the bottom-line companies that are already changing their behavior based on what they’re seeing with their own eyes.

Lloyd: You did such a good job in creating a sense of alarm about all this, but America as a whole seems to be concerned—not yet, I would say, alarmed. The process of political mobilization takes a long time, and it seems to be one of the issues where the immediate threat is hard to see and the consequence of addressing, in all its complexity, the cost could be very high. What do you think it is about Americans now that makes us either ready to do this or not quite ready, reluctant, needing to be led? Where do you… how do you read where Americans are on this right now?

Tidwell: Well, I think the country is changing on this issue, and I think that the elections that we had in the fall is reflective of that. And certainly a lot of the polling data showed that Americans increasingly are concerned about national energy security. It’s a national security issue. They’re concerned about mountain top removal, that one in six women in this country have elevated mercury because half of our electricity comes from exploding coal to create electricity. And they’re concerned about climate change. I mean, you can’t…

You’d have to live in a cave not to get the media reports that this problem is getting worse. I think that breaking it down to the faith community in this country… I think that we have to do a better… I’m a Presbyterian… I think we have to do a better job of responding to this issue fundamentally at the level that it exists. And by that I mean, you know, is global warming a political issue?

Absolutely. Sure it is.

Is it an economic issue? Absolutely. It’s an economic issue.

But more than anything else, global climate change is a moral issue. It is a moral issue. It is an issue of right versus wrong.

We know what’s causing it. We know what’s causing our climate to change. It’s our use of oil, coal and natural gas. Violent fuels which upon combustion create carbon dioxide, and odorless invisible gas that migrates to atmosphere and traps heat. That’s what’s warming the planet. Our activity.

We know what we can do about it. We know we can get off these fossil fuels quickly.

You mentioned economic cost. It’s economic savings that will come with it. And one of the truths of that is right now in Maryland as of March 11—as of last week—wind power in Maryland is cheaper than coal-fired electricity.

You can now, on your PEPCO or BG&E bill, sign up for a hundred percent wind power and your electricity bill will go down. It’s competing that well now. So clean and…

I have information I can tell you about afterwards. We have information on a table out there, you can take home a certificate and learn how you can get, if you live in Maryland, clean wind power. The point is this: alternatives to fossil fuels are becoming more competitive through the work of all of us who’ve been promoting it and it’s now time to accelerate it. Thankfully we have a president who gets it, a president who said he wants to cap on carbon dioxide, that he wants to work with Congress, and I think we are about to see a total transformation in the way our economy runs.

And we’re going to be more prosperous, and more at peace with our neighbors because of clean energy.

Lloyd: I want to get to some of the details of how we might go forward, but let’s stay for a minute, what you’re saying is, it isn’t economic problem, the political problem but it’s clearly a moral and religious problem. Say something about what you see to be the moral and religious dimension of why this is so critical for people of faith to address.

Tidwell: I’m really happy to be here to talk about the moral aspects of climate change, because I don’t think we talked about it enough. And especially as a Christians and among fellow people of faith, I really like having this conversation. I will tell you though, three things that motivate me to fight global climate change. Number one, I’m a father on an 11-year old boy, Michael Alexander Tidwell, born May 30th, 1997.

He’s everything to me. He’s the whole world to me. And it is wrong for us to alter the life-giving climate for him and his friends, and everyone of his generation and of all children all over the world. When we know what we’re doing, it is wrong for us to go that path. We have to choose another path for our children. He’s my number one motivator.

Number two is my Christian faith. Christian is glorious, it’s amazing. We were given this amazing bounty by our creator and we are instructed to be good shepherds of this creation, this wondrous web of life. That it’s sacred, it is ours to renew and to protect, not destroy and denude.

And number three is my deep, deep sense of justice when it comes to human rights.

When I was in my twenties, right out of college in the 1980s I joined the Peace Corps, and I lived for two years in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere in the Congo. And in this village that I lived in, it wasn’t a question of dirty coal fired electricity versus clean wind powered electricity, these people in this village didn’t have electricity. It wasn’t a question of giant, you know, SUV, dirty SUV, vehicles versus clean hybrid cars, these people didn’t have cars. They contribute almost nothing to global warming. As a whole, Africa is almost a billion people. As a continent it generates maybe three to four percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. You’re talking about a continent that’s fundamentally innocent in this whole global warming problem.

Then you look at the United States. Less than five percent of the world’s population, we generate 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. Now in a perfect world, we would get 25 percent of all the world’s warming just right on top of our nation, just telescoped right on top of that, if the world were perfect and fair. And if we got 25 percent of all the world’s warming right on our territory, we’d already be wrecked as a country. Florida would already be in a series of islands. Kansas would already be a scrub desert.

But since we can “share” the warming with Africa, and share it with Bangladesh, and South Pacific Island nations that will literally disappear, we seem to be okay with that as Americans. And I submit to you that this is totally, utterly, morally unacceptable, what we’re doing. And that we have to dramatically reduce our impact on greenhouse gases and help the rest of the world cope with what we’ve already done.

So I approach this as a father, as a Christian and as someone who’s lived with vulnerable people who are innocent in this problem overseas and see it as a human rights issue. So if you bring it all together, this is a powerful ethical issue, and we are commanded by our conscience and by our creator to take action not later, not when our neighbors did it, not when it’s convenient, but to take action now.

Lloyd: You’ve compared it to the civil rights movement. What’s the analogy there?

Tidwell: Well the comparison I made to the civil rights movement is… look, in the 1950s and ’60s, the country was made morally awake to the issue of a partied in the South and across much of our country, and I compare this to the current “go green” movement. And we all know “go green” means you can’t pick up a magazine now that doesn’t have a green… special green issue and newspaper article that describes how bad global warming is and it has this little box and we all know it so well, 10 things you can do at home to fight global warming. Turn off the lights, change your light bulbs, carpool to work, great, great, great, it’s all great stuff. God knows I have totally gone green at my house in Takoma Park: solar electricity, hot water, native plant garden, I’m a vegetarian, I drive a Prius, I’m horribly green.

My point is this, though. Voluntary changes to combat global warming are great, and you have a personal moral responsibility to do all you can, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough. And morally it’s not enough. Why? Because if you look back to the Civil Rights Movement, when George Wallace stood out in front of the University of Alabama and he said, “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” did the rest of us say “You know, Governor Wallace, will you voluntarily consider ten ways that you might integrate over time? Just voluntarily think about that, please.” Did we tell… the lunch counters that denied blacks meals, did we say, could you guys voluntarily create a list where you know you might… No, the moral wrong was so enormous. It was so ethically unacceptable, we banned the practice by national statute. We said no, you cannot discriminate based on race, gender, color, creed.

The same is true with climate change now. We need to voluntarily do all we can. We also need to come together in public places—Christians, as non-Christians, come together and ask our politicians; “What are 10 things you are doing by statute to stop the violent practice of taking the tops off mountains and burning coal to create electricity and bringing Rita, Katrina and Wilma to coastal United States.” What are the ten statutes that we can pass that can phase out the violent practices on moral ground to protect us from global warming in the same way we passed the, you know, Fair Housing Act, the Fair Voting Act, all the great civil rights laws in the ’60s.

So that’s the comparison. We, every time Exxon Mobil and Peabody Coal and all the main global warming companies hear us talk about going green and only going green, and changing light bulbs, they applaud us. Bravo! Bravo! Keep going, you nutty kids! But when we started talking about a carbon cap, when we started talking about changing market mechanisms so that Americans buy less oil and use less coal, that’s when they have a problem, because then they know the paradigm is truly shifting. So we have to come together, take individual action, go green, but also get involved in your larger community.

Lloyd: What do you see legislatively, that ought to be done? Carbon cap, is that something that seem right for you? How would you like to see us go forward?

Tidwell: Well it’s a great question. I want you to think about market forces for a second. And I want to recognize and join me in recognizing that the very best thing that we could do to fight global warming is simply to change the preference within our marketplace for clean energy versus dirty energy.

Right now there’re a lot of subsidies, a lot of political and institutional, economic preference given to coal, preference given to oil and discouragements and market road blocks given to alternatives. Okay, that’s the system we have now. So how do we change that?

The best thing we can do is simply put a price on carbon, pass some sort of national mechanism that actually makes coal, oil, and natural gas more expensive versus wind, solar, and efficiency.

And how can we do that? By, as the president says, having a national carbon cap. Now, what would happen if coal-fired electricity and oil and gas become more expensive? Before you think about that, I want you to think about right now, all the different ways that you are experiencing the recession in your life right now. Think of all the fifteen, twenty different ways that you see it happening with your own eyes. You know someone who’s been laid off, the National Cathedral’s had to have budget cuts, the D.C. government is laying off 1,600 people, you have less on your 401(k), on and on and on… We all can name all these different things. Now there have been no government agencies or regulation who commanded every single piece of that pie that you’re seeing in the recession right now.

It’s market forces man: powerful, ubiquitous, efficient, changing, reducing the size of our economy everywhere we look. Now that of course is a negative, scary example of how market forces can work. But they can also work in a positive direction.

So imagine that same power and ubiquitousness being transformed to the good. If you make coal fired electricity more expensive, you know, require a permit for its combustion, and oil, more expensive, then you’re going to see in your life five, ten years from now, everywhere you look efficiency gains, wind power, one hundred mile an hour car. No single government agency will have to command every one of those things, they’re going to happen everywhere all at one time in a transformative way because of the power of markets. So the most important thing we need to do is simply put a price signal on carbon fuels and then stand back.

The president has an idea to cap carbon and take 85% of the money generated from that and give it back to Americans in terms of tax rebates. I would do it slightly differently, I will give Americans simply a monthly dividend every month instead of a tax rebate at the end of the year, but I think the president is on track. The main thing though is we need a national carbon cap.

Lloyd: We’ll go to questions from the audience. Let me just stay with this for a second. Do you… so you would argue that we go forward with this in spite of the economic downturn. Some would say we’ve got to get out of this hole we’re in first but you’re saying it’s more urgent than that?

Tidwell: A big part of our economic downturn is our use of oil, coal, and natural gas. I mean, how much are we going to wind up spending on the Iraq war, in the war on Afghanistan? I mean… look, we entered these two countries after 9/11. Seventeen of the 21 hijackers on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia. You know, what is the connection? I mean, the Middle East has been upset with, and we have been unpopular with most of the countries in the Middle East because of our addiction to oil, because of our military presence even before 9/11. If we no longer use oil from the Middle East, will there still be religious hatred and cultural hatred? Yes, but they’ll be throwing rocks at each other in Saudi Arabia. They won’t be attacking us, because we won’t be using their oil. We won’t be there. If we get off of oil, if we get off foreign oil, no more 9/11s, no more war in Afghanistan and Iraq and all the expenses there.

Also, coal is very expensive taking the tops off of mountains in Appalachia. You know we used to take the coal out of the mountains; now we just take the mountains off the coal. Horrific! Horrific impact to natural and human communities before we even burn it. But the cost of the coal-fired electricity is not reflected in that. We don’t put the cost of mercury poisoning in the cost of that electricity; the cost of asthma, the parents who missed work because they have to stay home with their children. In D.C. 25 percent… some of the schools in D.C. have a 25 percent asthma rate. All the economic impact from the use of oil, coal and natural gas, none of which is associated with wind power, solar and energy efficiency. There is no asthma with wind, there is no code red smog days with solar, you don’t get sea level rise though energy efficiency. So, all these negative drags on our economy are washed away and we actually grow stronger as an economy.

Now there is this issue of the cap. If you put a cap on carbon fuels, your gasoline, the cost of gasoline in the pump is going to go up. It is. The cost of coal fired electricity is going to get more expensive. Your energy costs generally are going to go up and that’s the point of the cap. But as the president says, and I agree with him, we’re going to take most of that money that comes from that cap and makes fuel more expensive and give it back to you. So that at least two-thirds of Americans break even or actually have more money. So you can have a cap that causes energy prices to rise if they’re carbon based, while still protecting the poor and the middle class. There’s a way to do it. We need to do it and it will make our economy overall grow stronger.

Lloyd: Questions from the audience, Deryl.

Deryl Davis: We’re going to ask you to pass your questions if you would to my colleagues who are coming down the center aisle now and we’ve got a couple of questions to start with here.

The first one is: Mike, how did you become an environmental activist, and did you have any kind of epiphany on what was happening to our planet?

Tidwell: Great question. I do not come from a career as an environmental executive or anything. I had a twenty-year career as a freelance print journalist. I’ve written six books. Prior to 2001, when I had my sort of “come to Jesus” moment on climate change… Prior to 2001, I was just a freelance writer, a general assignment writer. I did travel, writing sports, history, culture, book reviews—I was just a freelance writer. And I love the environment, I hike, camp, fish and things like that but I wasn’t an environment professional.

Until 2001 when this really big scientific study came out in 2001, saying that the planet was really going to warm a lot unless we got off carbon fuels. My son was four years old at that time and I just… I felt my own conscience went into overdrive and I said you know, I have to give everything I have to this issue until it’s solved.

And that’s when I formed my group, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. I solarized my home in 2001, I changed my life a lot you know. I first began with me, you know. I completely changed the way I live. Solar… I heat my house with corn kernels actually, not corn ethanol but corn kernels raised by a Mennonite farmer in Fredrick County forty miles from my house. So as we speak right now it’s cold; in my house it’s warm and there is a little Franklin stove type thing that burns corn kernels. And there’s 75 families in Takoma Park, Silver Spring… We have a granary in Takoma Park, and our farmer brings his feed truck down, puts it in the granary. We heat our homes, it dramatically reduces our carbon footprint, saves us money.

So I began in 2001 by changing my life, because I knew that I was then going to go out in public and ask people, like you and everyone I met, to change your life and change the way you see the world, change the way you vote, but I wasn’t going to make any changes until I changed everything I possibly could in my own life. So that’s how I came to this issue… really, suddenly in 2001.

Davis: This question is a follow up to part of the earlier conversation: In your view, how can faith communities as a group as a whole best support scientists and environmental group in building awareness and in bringing about the changes that we need?

Tidwell: It’s a great question. It is my view that the faith community is dramatically underrepresented in this public conversation about global warming. True, we do have a growing number of faith groups that are engaged. True, we do have the Interfaith Power and Light groups across the country including the Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light, which the Cathedral has been a great fond of. And I’m administering committee of the TWIPNL. There’s a lot going on and by the way in case you don’t know, the Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Life has a Lenten carbon fast program where you can just reduce your carbon input or footprint during Lent and you can learn more on their website, I think it’s gwipl.org , that’s Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light. So a whole program for Lent related to your carbon footprint, which I think is great.

So there’s a lot going on but you know but I’ve got to say, the students in this country, the campuses are coming awake, there were twelve thousand students here last month for a giant conference on global warming. I think you’re seeing you know, the environmental communities certainly made it a top priority. The president has made it a top priority.

I’m not convinced that the faith community has made it a top priority. And you know when you look back to the civil rights movement, you saw students, you saw average Americans involved but at the very front of it were people of faith. I mean, Martin Luther King was a pastor. People of faith really led that moral issue and I don’t see that same kind of mobilization at the very top. I don’t see the same, you know, faith leaders who are saying march with me, walk with me, protest with me, boycott with me, and we need more of that.

We need every congregation, every place of faith to get more engaged, because again, this is our issue. This is our issue. This is the moral issue of our time. If there’s a greater moral issue, one that involves a greater sense of justice, and human rights, and fairness, and children, and grandchildren, and innocent people—if there’s an issue that brings all that together more, that is as urgent as this is one now in our culture, I’m not aware of it . This is our issue.

Davis: This question is asking, if you could plan a national bailout plan for the environment, I guess similar to economic bailout plans, what would it look like and what would the timeline have to be?

Tidwell: Well, Jonathan Lash, used to head at the World Resources Institute is famous for saying nature doesn’t do bailouts. You pass a certain threshold with nature and that’s it. It’s over. You’ve gone to a new world. Dr. James Hansen, who’s America’s most famous, incredible climate scientist, used to head the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, he says that if we allow, and again we’re allowing this to happen, if we allow the planet to warm another two degrees or more Fahrenheit, then we’re going to have a new planet. We’re going to be living on a new planet. It’s going to be different.

Something really really big is coming. So we can’t allow it to get that bad and then bail ourselves out. It’s not like Wall Street. We have to prevent the worst damage from happening. We have to act now. We have to get off carbon fuels dramatically. We have lots of things we need to do. And again, the best thing that we can do is support the president in getting a national carbon cap passed. It’s fair, equitable, good for the economy, and makes sense.

Now, why will there be a fight? Why… how can we possible think that something that can be good for the economy and stop sea level rise, etc., would be opposed by anybody? Well, it’s because a lot of people, a lot of corporations make a lot of money on the way things are now. The status quo is very very profitable to Exxon Mobil, they made over forty billion dollars in profits last year. There’s a lot of money to be made. Now, nobody’s talking about putting anyone out of business, what we need to do is reward Exxon Mobil: you want profits? We’ll reward you for being more efficient. We’ll reward you for getting into solar. We’ll reward you for becoming an energy company, not an oil company, an energy company that promotes wind.

What we won’t reward you for, in fact, we’ll penalize you for, is continuing to make us over-reliant on Saudi Arabian oil. That’s what we’re not going to reward you for anymore.

So people will win under this new economy. There will great… millionaires will be made. People will prosper under a clean energy economy. It’s just going to be done in a different way that protects us instead of hurts us.

Davis: We’ve got a lot of question coming in, so in a couple of cases I will nail them together and this is one. Several different questions pertaining to: How do we know or how do we separate out global warming from and the natural cycle that is a natural part of climate change over ethics?

Tidwell: Again, I will refer to the Bush administration’s own studies, the National Academy of Sciences, the data goes on and on and on. You know, what’s driving the warming? You know, everybody finally does agree that the planet is warming. Even George Will says that the planet is in fact warming.

But is it because of volcanoes, is it increased sun spots, you know, from the sun? Who knows, you know? Or is it human activity? And the overwhelming, overwhelming scientific consensus, according to the Bush administration is that is human activity. So that question has been settled.

Will there always be people who’d say it’s sun spots, always say, you know, it’s volcanic activity, always say it’s natural? Of course. There will be. I’m sure within a five-minute walk of this Cathedral I can find someone who truly believes that the planet is flat and that men never went to the moon. I mean, those people won’t stop existing. But the overwhelming center of the scientific consensus is that this is human driven, we are changing the climate and if we want to keep this life-giving climate that allows agriculture in Kansas, we might want to get off of fossil fuels.

Davis: Several more questions that pertain to the subject of the international community dealing with climate change, how the U.S. relates to other countries, particularly growing economies like that in China and India, are they cooperating as we would need them to help stop this problem?

Tidwell: Before I answer the question, I do want to remind you guys that, you know, as you’re leaving today, you know, wherever I speak, I’m an organizer—that’s what I do. So I hope that everyone who comes here maybe learns, expands education on this issue a little bit and maybe, God willing, is a little bit inspired by something that Dean and I talked about.

But for me as an organizer if that’s all that happens is that you’re a little bit inspired and a little bit educated and that’s it, and you’d go home then I have failed. I might as well not have come, because my goal is to move you to action, to give you things to do. And if you want things to do, they’re out there on the table. I would just say two things.

One, again, if you live in Maryland and you want to save money on your electricity bill, buy wind power. You now have to pay extra for coal fired electricity, you have to pay a premium for mountain top removal, because you could be getting wind power. So there’s information back there.

Also, just tell me how I can stay in touch with you. Give me a card before you leave. We have a clipboard back there. Write down your information, just tell me how I can inform you about what’s happening on Capitol Hill, what’s happening in D.C., what’s happening in Maryland and Virginia. And then there’s other… lots of propaganda, but those are the two big things I want to alert you too. Buy wind power if you live in Maryland, and just let me know how we can stay in touch with you.

India and China, it always comes up whenever I speak. Well, we can go to zero power emissions but if China doesn’t get involved we’re still going to rake the planet. Reality is, China is a huge problem. It’s a huge problem and we should be focused on China. China is building a new coal fired power plant every seven to ten days with no carbon capture or anything. That is a huge problem for my eleven-year-old child. Huge problem! The reality however, is that China will not… will not… will not stop building a single coal fired power plant until America stops too.

We’re building right now in Wise County, Virginia, on the other side of the river, a 485-mega watt coal fired power plant right now. Brand new! It’s going to create five hundred million tons of new carbon dioxide every year in the state of Virginia supported by the governor of Virginia. It is unbelievable that we are building this coal fired power plant especially since Virginians use twice as much electricity per capita as people in New York State. Obviously there’s a lot of efficiency gains that could be had in Virginia first before you build new coal plants.

But the reality is, as long as we build new coal plants in America, nobody in the rest of the world’s going to stop, because they look for us for leadership. India, Australia, China.

We have to get our house in order in America. We need to stop building coal fired power plants, we need to start retiring the existing ones, and we need to get on wind power, efficiency and solar.

So, we do have to… you know, we do have to get India and China off coal. And we have to get them on to clean energy. But until we start doing it, that conversation is not going to happen. I believe that within the next four years, we’re going to substantially begun to create our pathway off of dirty energy and we are going to have a strong moral voice, a legitimate moral voice to take to China and India and say, you must, you must do it too. You must do it too. And there will be consequences; good if you do it, consequences bad if you don’t. It’s a moral issue. We have to make it a global statutory thing as well.

Davis: Several people have asked about nuclear energy, nuclear power. Is that environmentally friendly? Is it secure?

Tidwell: Nuclear power. It’s a great question. I am a global warming activist. My overriding goal is simply to do my part to help turn the global carbon dioxide spigot off. We have to turn that greenhouse gas spigot off. That’s my goal. Nuclear power is mostly greenhouse gas free in how it creates electricity.

If, if I thought that nuclear power was the fastest and cheapest, you know, fastest and best way to get off fossil fuels I’d say build the nuclear power plant next to my house. Despite the weapons proliferation issue, despite the biohazard issues and all the rest, I’d say build it next to my house because it would turn the CO2 spigot off.

The problem with nuclear though, and I’m not an anti-nuclear activist, I’m a climate activist, the problem with nuclear power though is, it’s so unbelievably expensive. I mean, you might as well burn twenty-dollar bills to turn turbines to create electricity than to use nuclear power. It’s no wonder that there’s not a single nuclear power plant in America that’s been built with Wall Street money. It’s all been built with government subsidies, rate payer subsidies. And even now they’re not talking about any kind of nuclear power plants that are actually financed with private capital. It’s government loan guarantees, it’s rate payers that are going to pay for it. Nuclear cannot compete even with wind power. Nuclear can’t compete with the other forms of energy and therefore, we don’t need it. Now I’m not talking about retiring any existing nuclear power plant. We should not.

We get about nineteen percent of our electricity nationwide from nuclear power. That’s great! It’s already been built, infrastructure’s there, it’s greenhouse gas free. Let’s keep them going another generation or two. Let’s not shut down the existing ones, but building one is not cost effective, and if we spend hundreds of billions of trillions of dollars building new nuclear plants, it’s going to be mean less for all the other things that we can invest in and get us to climate safety faster.

Davis: Several questions have asked about this carbon cap versus carbon dividends. This question is specifically: is a carbon tax better than a carbon cap and trade?

Tidwell: Great question. There are three different approaches out there in Capitol Hill. One is a carbon tax. Just tax the fuels, just a straightforward tax, and that will discourage people from using them and you can redistribute the money to all Americans.

There’s cap and trade. Cap it and let companies trade the permits, and some of it goes back to voters and some of it doesn’t. And then there’s this idea of what’s called cap and dividend, which, I personally support the last one.

Carbon tax… anything spelled t-a-x is dead on arrival politically, in my view. It’s just a reality. I happen to think it’s the best policy, I think it’s the one that would be easiest to implement and the easiest to be globalized that sync our tax with China’s and India’s and have one system. I think it happens to be that makes the most sense logically but politically it’s not going to happen, in my view.

Cap and trade… there’re a lot of conversations about cap and trade. Let’s cap it. Let’s cap every smoke stack, every tailpipe, let’s let companies trade these permits, etc., and it’s complicated. I mean there was a vote in June, or there was a conversation in the U.S. Senate on the… Lieberman-Warner bill in June, it was a 1,600-page bill, it’s very complicated.

The polluting companies are trying to make to protect themselves in this legislation. They want to be able to trade, they want to buy offsets, they want to purchase forests in India, they want to do everything to keep their cost down as low as possible. The reality is we don’t want carbon fuels to be as low as possible in terms of price. We want carbon fuels to rise, that’s the whole point.

Remember, we talked about the market, market signals, the cap and trade approaches m