Acceptance Remarks 2002 Award of Honor Banquet Natural Resources Council of America National Press Club September 25, 2002

I have to confess to divided emotions about this award.

On the one hand, I am deeply honored that this extraordinary group has seen fit to recognize me in this fashion. I look over the list of giants who have received it in past years and I'm amazed and thrilled that NRCA has placed me in their ranks.

On the other hand, one of my young staff members looked over the list of past recipients and remarked, casually, "Looks like you are now a certified geezer."

It was my biggest let down since my wife explained to me that becoming a sexagenarian wasn't going to be anything like it sounds.

Whenever a man walks up on stage to receive an award, the odds are pretty good that there is an army of women who actually made it possible. In no field is this more true than the environment. And in no instance is it clearer than tonight.

I will begin with my wife, Gail Boyer, who combines the political acuity of Jefferson, the painstaking integrity of Galileo, and the patience of Job. The daughter of a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Gail has been vigilant for many decades, ensuring that I always get the science right. She has taken, and passed, three separate bar exams - a level of commitment that only lawyers can fully appreciate - following me around the country as I find new windmills to tilt at.

Tonight, you've already met the indefatigable Kathleen Rogers - President of Earth Day Network, which currently operates in 184 nations. Kathleen is the next generation of leadership in the world's largest secular, theme-driven holiday, as well as the movement generally.

Pam Lippe organized the largest single urban demonstration in American history - 1.8 million participants in New York City - as part of Earth Day 1990.

Sherry Liao is using Earth Day to begin to create the framework for a true national environmental movement in China. In fact, women are prominent in Earth Day from Indonesia to Italy, from Australia to Jordan.

This is true for the whole movement.

Their ranks include Harriet Bullitt, Lois Gibbs, Kathryn Fuller, Caroline Chase, Rebecca Wodder, Rachel Carson, Ruth Cluson, Cynthia Helms, Theo Coburn, Sandra Steingraber, Meg McGuire, Martha Marks & Andrea Yank - not to mention millions of women working in corporations and labor unions, teaching school and holding office and practicing medicine and doing research. All have given this movement much of its intelligence, its inclusiveness, and its integrity. All have received too little recognition.

Finally, I certainly couldn't accept an award of which Earth Day is a part without acknowledging my debt to Senator Gaylord Nelson. For some reason, Gaylord placed an enormous bet on 24-year-old college student back in 1969, and he fundamentally changed my life.

My greatest asset at the time may have been that I was simply too young to know that the job was impossible. So I recruited a staff of similarly young, naïve idealists who also didn't know it was impossible, so they just did it.

Twenty million people turned out for the original Earth Day, and then mobilized to defeat 7 of the original Dirty Dozen members of Congress, and built the momentum that passed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, created the EPA, and launched a peaceful revolution in human values that has now swept through much of the world. Thirty-two years after the first Earth Day:

• the bald eagle is no longer endangered,
• the Great Lakes are returning to life.
• Air pollution has decreased by more than one-third, even though we now are driving almost twice as many cars more than twice as many miles a year.
• The Cayahoga River no longer catches on fire.
• Hundreds of streams, lakes, and bays are now swimmable.
• The hole in the ozone layer is starting to heal.
• Millions of people choose to recycle, conserve water and energy, eat lower on the food chain, and limit their family size for environmental reasons.

Those of you in this room can take enormous pride in this accomplishment.

The environmental movement that grew out of that spring protest in 1970 may well be the most successful social movement in American history.

Amid the raft of legislation and regulations and lawsuits and grassroots organizing, Americans have come to understand something very important.

The environment isn't something "out there:"

We breathe the environment.

We drink the environment.

We eat the environment.

We cannot harm the environment without harming ourselves.

And when we improve the environment, we improve our own prospects.

The right to a safe, healthy environment -- a concept that essentially did not exist before 1970 -- has become an American core value - possessing wider, deeper public support than some values enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

That's the good news. And it is very good news.

But environmentalists have a congenital aversion to good news, so you would all leave disgruntled unless I also recognized that there is some bad news. And it is very bad news.

As a thought exercise, try to think of what people will remember about today 200 years from now.

Think back 200 years ago, what was important?

How many of you selected the 30 Years War?

No, it was the rise of industrialization and the emergence of democracy as a mode of national government.

200 years from now, Saddam Hussein will not even be a footnote to history. George Bush will likely trigger some vague familiarity, akin to Millard Fillmore.

In the long sweep of history, I believe this millennial period will be principally remembered as the first time in the history of the planet when a single species took on the attributes of a geophysical force.

We have begun to teraform the planet.

We are changing the climate at an ever-accelerating pace.

We are triggering an epidemic of extinction akin to that following as asteroid collision.

The number of Homo sapiens has swollen to the point where, in order for everyone on Earth today to have a Swedish standard of living, we would need five more planets.

Question: Ignore for a moment the Persian Gulf: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates. Consider all the oil that has ever been produced and ever will be produced from conventional sources. Don't include bituminous sands or shale or natural gas liquids or methane hydrates - just oil. Not reserves at some arbitrary price and a given technology, but rather all the ultimately recoverable conventional petroleum.

Remember that oil production will still grow for a considerable period in some places, even after it begins to decline in others. In the United States, for example, it peaked in 1970. The Caspian is barely beginning production today.

But in the aggregate - ignoring the Persian Gulf - when will oil production from the entire rest of the world as a whole peak and begin to decline?

There are obviously some error boundaries on an estimate like this - including deposits that have not even been discovered yet - but modern exploration technology and sophisticated statistics have narrowed it considerably.

Most of the evidence suggests that the worldwide year of peak production - excluding the Persian Gulf - was 1997.

Five years ago.

It is long past time to start getting serious about an energy transition. And the Bush Administration - instead of joining with Saudi Arabia to kill the modest renewable energy goals proposed at Johannesburg - should be leading that transition. America has the wealth, the scientific excellence, the entrepreneurial culture to create an energy revolution every bit as profound as the information revolution it led. Even as early procurement by the Department of Defense and NASA drove up the volume and drove down the price of computer chips, so can government leadership dramatically accelerate the dawn of the solar era. On September 12 of last year, President Bush should have stood before the nation and announced that this nation was committing to eliminating, instead of deepening, its dependence on the Persian Gulf. He should have told America that energy conservation is not just a "personal virtue" but an essential pillar of national security. Bush could still become a central historical figure - we all love a repentant sinner - if only he would put America's long term interests ahead of the short-term profits of the oil industry.

If America had begun this transition 20 years ago, we could be receiving a quarter of our energy today from renewable resources with little pain and little expense. The roadmap was developed in great detail under the Carter Administration.

We can no longer avoid serious pain and significant expense. But we are rich and we will cope.

Most of the rest of the world is not so lucky. For most of the developing world, it is now difficult to imagine an energy path that does not involve calamity.

Avoiding planetary calamities - whether in energy or climate or extinction or exceeding the planet's carrying capacity - is the primary moral obligation of our era.

Global stewardship is the new challenge and the core imperative of the modern environmental movement.

This gigantic moral dimension is what makes environmentalism more than "just one more special interest."

And it is what makes the people in this room so very special.