Have you listened to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host and we have a guest Bill Snape, American University College of Law, Adjunct Professor. They’re also senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. Bill also has a podcast High Air in which he discusses environmental issues. Welcome to the show, Bill.

Thanks for having me, a pleasure.

Well, Bill, why don’t you just kind of talk to us a little bit about what the what kind of work you’re doing over at the Center for Biological Diversity?

Well, the Center for Biological Diversity is a growing environmental advocacy group, we have eight or nine different programs, endangered species, climate change, food toxics, you name it, I’m missing a few in that litany. And I think the thing about the center that makes it most unique and why I’ve so enjoyed working there the last 15 years is that it mixes law, science, and communications in a very direct and unique way.

And I’m a lawyer, so I both file lawsuits and do a little bit of policy works in Washington, DC, but we have scientists and lawyers who don’t even come close to Washington, DC unless they want to. We have folks that work on Programs and Issues all over the country, in fact, all over the world now. And so the center is, I would say a hard hitting, but creative advocacy group that cares about the big creators and the little critters. And it’s a really cool place to work. We do good stuff. And I say that because I’m sort of one of the old folks now a lot of the new generation has come and it’s it’s a it’s a fun place to work.

Well, that’s good to hear. Well tell us a little bit about the lawsuits that you filed recently. And what are you working on there?

Well, so the petition where we met each other, was petitioned to the General Services Administration and agency, not many people have heard of if they even focus on the federal government. The General Services Administration is sort of like the agency of agencies that see that for non Department of Defense buildings is in charge of all federal buildings.

That’s the GSA, the General Services Administration buys all the motor vehicles that federal employees use, again, except those that are out of the Department of Defense. So it has huge procurement powers powers to spend on behalf of the federal government that we believe could be far better, focused and spent on clean renewable energy. And so we petitioned the agency to overhaul their regulations.

And we’re hopeful that the Biden GSA will go in the right direction. And if they don’t go enough in the right direction, we’ll sue them, but the way that this particular petition process works, they’ll have a few months to consider it and, and there won’t be any litigation. So 22 At the least, my other litigation is really across the board. I do some grizzly bear work. I’ve done a lot of work under the Freedom of Information Act, particularly when we were battling the Trump administration, but frankly, all administrations need sunshine. So my particular portfolio at the at the center is sort of very…
Okay, well, one of the things that you had been quoted as saying was that the net zero target is too weak. The 20 the Biden 2050 Net Zero target is too weak and undermines the GSAs own 2025 pledge. Can you comment on that for us?

Yeah. So birthday this year. Then Acting Administrator, now deputy administrator, a woman by the name of Katie kale, I have not met Katie, announced on Earth Day this year on behalf of the administration still on GSAs website that they were going to go to clean, renewable 100% energy, renewable energy by 2025. And so we took them at their word. And that was what our petition incorporated as a target date.

Well, lo and behold, a few days after our petition, when the Biden administration announces this new executive order, all the dates have been pushed back. The 2025 date, I think, is now 2035. That a lot of dates that they threw on the paper. And so we call them out on it, not because they’re trying, we’re happy. They’re trying and we recognize this is not easy to do. But there was no real reason why they backtracked at least a decade or two on their targets. And I think more problematic, and I think this is perhaps the more serious issue and I think we’re seeing it in the US Senate right now, the power of the fossil fuel industries.

What does Net Zero even mean? Carbon Neutrality, another one of these buzzwords, which really means Yeah, we’re going to try to do as much renewable energy clean renewable energy as we can, but if we buy some offsets with natural gas, or if we burn a little coal, but we do some good things over here with a fire For us, we’ll call it net zero.

And we’ll be happy, right?

And from our perspective, no, we will not be happy, we would like to ramp down the fossil fuel use now, not through gimmicks like net zero, which is really allowing fossil fuels to continue to be burned under various bank mitigation regimes, none of which are proven to work I might as well, you know, let’s get into that a little bit more, because this is an area that I think, is hidden a lot from the public view, which is bank mitigation and explain that to our listeners a bit so that they can understand it. And I can understand a little bit better as well.

What happens in a couple of contexts, this idea of mitigation. And in some contexts, it’s good, it’s the idea of, well, we’re going to do something now that’s going to harm a species or harm the climate or whatever the environmental amenity is, but we promise we’ll do something over there to make it better. Sometimes, in some situations that might be appropriate, but certainly at a smaller scale, in the context of climates. And I should just say, before I started this, all throughout high school, college law school, I was sort of trained, you know, the markets work.

And you know, it’s got to be efficient. But when I started looking at mitigation, first with wildlife, and now with regard to climate pollutants, what it really ends up meeting is yes, we’re going to allow you Exxon Mobil and Chevron and all the other oil and gas industry players to essentially continue as business as usual, because we don’t really want to disrupt that. And if you make a move to clean, renewable energy, and if indeed you do other things that offset your use of fossil fuels, will give you prizes, or awards or net zero labels. And I’m not saying that’s exactly what the Biden Net Zero plan is, I think the Biden netzero plan. It does have some good faith in it.

But a lot of it is we don’t want to disturb the status quo. We want to continue as is. So as we continue as is we’re going to plan a forest over here, throw a couple of renewable vehicles out over there and call it somehow, you know, a win win for all and that’s just bogus. And I think the net zero issue is bogus, because I think we really need to tangibly talk about how when and at what speed we’re ramping down our use of fossil fuels.

It is it is a carbon dioxide and methane, little bit of nitrous oxide that are driving the climate catastrophe that we have, we’ve got to stop using those substances that cause that pollution, it’s really quite simple.

Well, in terms of walk us through an example, in terms of say, planting a forest, is there a specific guideline, which says, Hey, if you plant X amount of forest, you will mitigate X amount of co2 or emissions such that you can continue to emit a certain amount of pollutants? Is there a formula that the federal government has for this?

Well, I’m sure someone at the fire service might have a formula, but I can tell you right off the bat that the formula is, you know, BSN and BSL that you just identified is what has bedeviled forest conservation at the global scale for years. Because we don’t live in a static system. So the best way to think about forest protection is to protect the old group protect the forest and the trees that are rolling, that’s usually a good starting point.

But forest, as we’ve seen in the United States, Australia, other places, they sometimes catch on fire, sometimes those fires are actually positive for the ecosystem. So we don’t really actually have a mathematical system that anyone relies upon to talk about massive scale forests or reforestation, to allow the type of fossil fuel pollution that we allow on some smaller scales, it might be possible, and I don’t want to throw all mitigation and all those types of mechanisms out the door, I think that would be foolish.

But to base the entire national climate system on that, that style of mitigation where we don’t really have to ramp down the fossil fuels. We can just sort of ramp down to fossil fuels if we add a couple forests or reforest. It doesn’t add up mathematically. And it’s been shown in other contexts to never work.

So it tells us there, there is a certain amount of these banks that exist out there that that give credits to people who are polluting if they kind of buy into these mitigation efforts. And who who’s regulating those and, and are they you know, are they doomed as you said to failure or, or how could they work going forward?

Well, I think events To the way it all has to work is that the market on some level needs to value clean, renewable energy, which I think with regard to solar and wind and battery technologies that’s happening, you’re seeing economic returns on those. But I think the larger issue with that is that the who’s regulating or the stock interest themselves, the real estate, the exchanges, the stock exchanges, we’ve seen that with carbon markets, we’ve seen that with agricultural futures and commodities, and that those are not good regulatory entities to be monitoring the type of environmental compliance that we’re talking about with these credits, it leads to the abuses we’ve seen in Europe.

Well, I guess, in terms of, I guess, I’ve seen a little bit about these mitigation efforts and banks, mitigation banks, and I assume there has to be some regulation that says to, to the, to the bank, how do they get these credits? And who’s giving them these credits? And, and how can they sell them? Internationally?

It’s done a little bit by the Paris Accord and United Nations, but there is no real effective regulatory force to look at that multinational.

Okay, so So in terms of, I saw a documentary on this, and they had a certain insect that they were trying to protect here, I believe in California, and they were giving credits to a company that bought some land that protected the insect and then then they sold those credits to a different company. And so, you know, there was a question as to whether or not that bank that was selling these credits is somehow regulated, such that there’s some oversight to this process.

We can pick that up after the break, perhaps.

Okay, well, you’re listening to KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, the host of Unite and Heal America, and we’re speaking to Bill Snape. And we’ll be right back after the break.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America, this is Matt Matern, your host on KABC 790. We’ve got Bill Snape, who’s Senior Counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. And Bill, we were just talking about these mitigation banks. And it’s my understanding that we don’t have mitigation banks for carbon in the US, but we have them for endangered species. Can you explain to us why the we don’t have that for carbon markets currently in the US?

And so it’s a really good question. And I’ll try to make it as simple as possible. To state the obvious right from the get go. Species bugs, birds, bears are a lot different than carbon, which is a chemical matter. So in the species context, because of the US Endangered Species Act, which actually does have some teeth and actually can and does protect species.

Entities that want to harm endangered species habitat sometimes can convince the federal authority usually the Fish and Wildlife Service, that they can destroy some endangered species habitat there, because they’re going to protect it over there. And it’s gonna be a net benefit. And we have fights all the time about that. But at least when those fights occur, the fight is the scientific standard of conservation of a species.

And there are legal cases and regulations that define whether that mitigation is good enough or not, in the carbon context, because at least at the United States domestic level, we really regulate greenhouse gases, we regulate some air pollution, that is also climate pollution. But we don’t really say that you can’t pollute carbon or methane anymore. We don’t really we don’t have any numeric limits.

Therefore, the markets for the larger for the most part, that have taken place, United States have been because the states have taken some baby steps. And usually those markets are voluntary. All markets are voluntary, but based upon markets happening, where carbon really is regulated like Europe, most of the most vibrant greenhouse markets are happening outside of the United States precisely because the United States does not really regulate the underlying greenhouse pollutants the way other entities do. That’s my best explanation as to the differences and similarities.

So are there any things are there? Are there any bills on the horizon that are being going through Congress that that may create any kind of limits on the amount of emissions that that the whole economy can emit or certain certain types of pollutants such as methane, or are we still had kind of the wild wild west where you can pollute as much as you want, kind of were a little bit in the wild wild west.

That’s another good question. And I think your question assumes that Congress can do much of anything. And I think over at least this century, we’re now 21 years in Congress has had grave difficulty agreeing on much of anything. And in fact, the fact that we got that recent infrastructure bill, that was actually bipartisan with a handful of Republicans was very significant. That was a lot of money that was put into the economy.

And obviously, the build back better act would put even more money, and we’d support the build back better act that that should occur. But at the bachelors much has thrown money at it from the regulatory point of view in terms of saying, that’s legal, that’s not illegal. That’s good. That’s bad. I do not see Congress acting on climate. I am skeptical, certainly not this Congress. And there have to be a huge electoral revolution in 2022. So that we didn’t have, you know, the Joe Manchin situation where one or two Democratic senators can block everything, because Democrats don’t have a helmet.

You know, it’s a 5050 tie in the Senate right now not even thinking about the filibuster. So the answer, therefore, is not Congress, except to throw money at it. It’s with the Biden administration, the Biden administration, at the Department of Interior and an EPA have the legal powers already, through the Clean Air Act and through other laws to institute the type of clean renewable energy system that we need. It is within President Biden’s authority to do and his agencies. And I think that’s gonna be the real historic question of his presidency.

Will he grasp the moment or not? He’s begun to grasp it. I think it’s too early to say he hasn’t grasped that. But you can see evidence that he’s grasping it, but his handle is getting a little loose sometimes, because he’s getting hammered by the fossil fuel industry interest. You know, anytime the price of gas goes up a penny, the Republicans are crying foul blaming it on greenhouse regulation, even though that’s BS, that line plays in Peoria. So Biden will have to you’ll have to be masterful as he does this.

Well, how, how would he do it under the Clean Air Act or through the EPA, to institute the types of changes that you’re, you think would be best for the environment?

Great question again. And it’s actually quite simple recall. And I think you probably do vaguely remember this, that way back when the Clean Air Act was passed. And in the early 1970s, we had problems with lead. We had problems with carbon monoxide, we had problems with smog, which is a combination of nitrous and sulfur oxides. Well, we established to get rid of those clean air problems in the 70s.

Something under the Clean Air Act is I’m gonna walk out on you now. But it’s called a National Ambient Air Quality Standard and a q s and clean air nerd world we call that next and a q s. This next system sets ScienceBase standards on how much is too much to pollute of these air pollutants. We did it with lead. We did it with carbon monoxide.

We did it with the sulfur dioxide and the nitrous dioxides. Now it’s time to do it with the greenhouse pollutants. That is the most logical program to reduce these pollutants. And the reason it hasn’t happened yet. Well, Trump administration didn’t do anything positive in this regard. And the Obama administration wimped out a little bit, they went through another provision of the Clean Air Act that allowed this economic cost benefit blah, blah, blah, the Clean Power Plan, really the Clean Power Plan was a netzero plan.

It was a way to begin the process of clean renewable energy, but continue business as usual, enact standard, a standard where we actually created a public health standard for how much greenhouse pollution is too much would have the real impact of reducing that pollution. And the President could start that process tomorrow with EPA if he wanted to.

And how long would that process take given that, you know, we have a lot of regulatory hurdles that need to be jumped through in order to have one of those regulations become kind of the law of the land, correct?

Well, for any rule, you need to have a public notice and comment so the public can participate in that rule. It would take a few years so that there was an intelligent public proposal, a comment period and then a finalization in a way that really represents our democratic small d democratic ways. But it could be done before the Biden administration, the first term is over quite easily if they started right now.

I guess that’s the $64,000 Question is, when are they going to start because time’s running. They’ve already been in office for almost a year and they haven’t haven’t gotten the process going. Have had they even done kind of the legwork on the front end to your knowledge to to make this proposal?

No, I don’t think they have on this yet. And I think that’s why our rhetoric got a little bit more heated with their with their government procurement proposal by the General Services Administration. They’re here they are setting goals as far out as 2045-2050.

We’ve already been in office a year. And our line was you got to stop talking and start doing so I agree with you this first year has been slow. They have had some other big battles. They’ve had the battle, there was a lot of detritus in the system left by the Trump agencies really, it did take a while to clean that up. But I agree with the premise of your question.

It is time to act, I think we are getting impatient. And 2022 is going to be a huge year, they’ve got to hit the ground running in January. And there’s some evidence that they may do that the infrastructure bill again, did provide the good agencies with some resources to to begin doing some of this stuff. But it’s a lot of work.

Well, basically, I think that a way that somebody said it to me and I kind of resonated which was in the wrong way, which was essentially we don’t have the right to clean air or clean water in the United States, we have the right for somewhat polluted air and water based upon the Clean Air Act as it exists.

So there is a right for industry to pollute, and put chemicals into our air and water up to certain levels. So we don’t have a right to really have pure air, we have a right to get somewhat polluted air. Is that a fair statement? Or is that a misstatement?

I’m gonna put on my Center for Biological Diversity, see for hat, our political action hat say, look at what the Republicans have done on health. They are not they don’t think health care is a right. So I guess I think the Republicans have just taken that unless you’re a fetus. They don’t care about what you’re drinking and breathing and imbibing it. It really is how you described it. And it’s why we don’t have universal health care.

There is a portion of this society that simply doesn’t appear to care. And it is problematic to minority. But I think it’s enough of that minority is loud enough, that that’s why Biden needs to be careful and how he frames this. And I think his emphasis on clean, renewable energy being an economic boon, I think is a winning message for him. And when he talks in those ways, he does better than when he becomes an apologizer for the fossil fuel industry, which he does sometimes by accident.

Well, I think that is something that needs to be framed in that way, at least for me, that it resonated for me that we we have air and water that is being polluted, and there isn’t a right to clean air and clean water in the United States, essentially, I don’t think it’s being communicated clearly enough to the American public, you are getting polluted air and polluted water.

And it is the law that that industries are allowed to do this. And we have to make this change or else you’re going to be breathing this stuff in and people get sick people die from this isn’t a good time to change the system.

But to pick up on that at the break after we’ll we’ll be talking about this after the break. You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, and we’re talking to Bill Snape and we’ll be back in just one minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790, guest today is Bill Snape, Senior Counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. And here we were talking about just before the break a number of different things.

But I kind of wanted to flip to where we were talking about the the Clean Air Act and the EPA making some changes that could allow the Biden administration to enforce standards for carbon and methane and other pollutants such similar to the lead sulfur and carbon monoxide that had previously done been done under the EPA. And I was kind of harkening back to you to Pete McCluskey, who is a former congressman, Republican Congressman out here in California, who had authored the Endangered Species Act back in the early 70s.

And how far we’ve come from that place in certainly from the Republican side of the spectrum. And some of the citizens suit provisions that are in the law that that allow lawsuits to be brought by citizens to enforce these provisions. And certainly as an attorney, I recognize the value of that because a lot of times agencies just sit on their hands, and they really don’t. They don’t regulate the industries they’re supposed to be regulating.

So it’s, it’s really it falls upon the hands of attorneys outside the government to enforce these provisions. What do you think, should be, should be done in that respect, if we’re going to revamp the Clean Air Act, to to include these other pollutants and other sources of greenhouse gases?

Well, that’s a big and great question. And I think you have to go back to when the statutes, the the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and many others, all passed in the early 70s. And Congress had some wisdom about it back then 50 years ago, where it knew that the standards would be sometimes tough, that agencies and individuals would sometimes be tempted to skirt them.

And so they very purposely put into these statutes, the citizens supervisions that you’re mentioning, and these citizens who provisions waive sovereign immunity that the federal government would otherwise have, Congress can say, these agencies can never be sued. And that would be constitutional. But Congress said, No, we want these public attorneys general, these private people to make sure the laws being enforced.

And some of our greatest environmental victories, Massachusetts versus EPA, where the Supreme Court finally acknowledged that climate change was an issue was because of a petition and a citizen supervision. So we wouldn’t have half of what we have in our country on the ground with real life protections had not real people, normal people, real citizens gone out and filed suit and protected those things. And so it is a rich tradition in this country.

And not shockingly, the Republican Party hates it now, the Republican Party has become a shill for Big industry and big church, depending upon the time of the day. And it is a shame. And it’s deeper than Pete McCloskey. And we used to have people like John Chafee and Sherry bowler just a few decades ago, like very there aren’t any Republicans like that anymore.

And instead, we’re arguing about things like January 6, do we still have a democracy or not, but it is it’s it is problematic. And it these these civil rights issues, these democratization issues are really touching environmental governance. Now, for the first time in my adult life, I can see how I perhaps took them all for granted as a young lawyer.

Well, waving sovereign immunity for those out there who are not lawyers is a big deal. And essentially, the government has the ability to say, you can’t sue us, because we’re the federal government, and for the federal government to say, we’re bringing that that wall down, you can sue us is an enormously important thing.

And I think it’s what it really allows is for citizens to be challenging the federal government as to the way they’re doing business. I mean, if there’s not, if you’re an anti big government person, or if you’re an anti, you’re thinking that the government has too much power, then waiving sovereign immunity is the way I think both left and right should say, this is a good thing.

We want our government to be more accountable, having sovereign immunity for everything basically insulates the government from any kind of wrongdoing. They can do whatever they want. And we as citizens can’t get at them. And that to me is wrong. I mean, that’s, that’s putting the government behind a wall that we can’t penetrate, and we can’t question their conduct.

I couldn’t agree more. That was I couldn’t say it any better. And really the words I would do, it’s participatory democracy. It’s more than just voting. It’s taking action that the government is authorizing you to take because you’re going to make the process better. I fill out the Freedom of Information Act, which I mentioned a few minutes ago or in another section.

It’s one of the few statutes and one of the few programs that focus on the left and the right both like for the reason you mentioned, because no matter who’s in power, we can get information from those agencies. What are they doing, how publicly accountable are they being? And it’s very interesting to see how administration’s respond to FOIA.

You know, the Bush administration certainly wasn’t perfect, but they were far better than the Trump administration on FOIA. And actually, the Obama administration sometimes play games with FOIA and it looks like the Biden administration isn’t doing that so far. So you can tell a lot by an administration on how open they are to open information issue?

Yeah, it’s certainly something. We’re losing trust in the government because of it not being accountable, and not being transparent. And we need a trans more transparent government, our government is complex enough, we have millions of people employed by the government, there are just so many different agencies, it’s so complex, that anything we can do to make it more transparent is better for us as, as a people, essentially, people have lost trust, because they feel like, oh, we can’t we can’t even understand what the government is doing behind closed doors.

So where are we going? Oh, you know, going back to something we had talked about earlier, which is the the GSA changing their their rules to net zero 2050? Why do you think? Or how would you suggest the Biden administration administration change that and make it a doable target? Because it seems like the 2025 target that they had stated earlier, is probably not really doable? Would you agree with that it is 2025 Even doable.

I think 2025 is doable in terms of getting federal buildings on clean, renewable energy. And it’s certainly doable to start buying more electric cars. So we do have the technological means now to to immediately turn the boat around. But I hear you, i this will not all happen. We didn’t get to where we are overnight, and it won’t go away overnight.

But I want to get back to something you just said because it relates to this question, which is, despite the fact that climate change, and wildlife conservation both can be complicated, like there are some fascinating, intense technical and scientific and sometimes esoteric things that need to be debated. We make them complex at our peril.

And I think one of the things that we need to think about climate change is when when any politician not just Joe Biden, because at least he’s trying unlike the previous president, when you use dates like 2050, like, Who even knows what 2050 means, I’ll probably be dead. Like no one thinks in any meaningful terms about what’s going to be happening in 2050, except in just abstract ways that our kids and grandkids I hope are okay, right. 2050 is so long away.

What I would suggest the Biden administration needs to do and there were glimmers of it. In their GSA announcement a couple of days after I filed my petition is to set tangible short term targets now and start working towards them. Don’t do mitigation. Don’t do netzero. Like actually go at the problem, and define and show how you’re going to ramp that problem down. You could easily do that with federal buildings.

There’s no reason why in a couple of years, not every single federal building can have a solar panel on it, a battery next to it and can be largely running on renewable energy, we wouldn’t be at maybe 100%. But I would a fraction of the money we spend with the military, we could be at 90 95% by the end of binders, administration.

That’s the type of tangible things we need to do not these complicated webs of mitigation and banking and all the things that go into modern regulation, which frankly, end up not working and making people more cynical in the long run.

Well, I hear you and I, from a management perspective, I’ve read a lot of books about management. And one of the ones that I liked the best was written by a guy named John Doerr, who wrote one, an OKR system objectives and key results, which he gave to a company he invested a while back in, as the first major investment was a company you may have heard of, it’s called Google.

And, you know, it went from 40 employees when he first invested to whatever 400,000 or something, and they’re still using that system. And what they do is they pick out three to five things every quarter, that are the top line, things that the organization really wants to shoot for, and shoots for them. And I see that, that as policymakers, the Biden administration, and pretty much many of their predecessors, predecessors doing the same thing.

They they spread the net so widely, that they don’t have focus. So what are the things that you would say, are those tangible short term targets that we can we can get some victories up on the board, all at the same time going for some of the longer term things but let’s let’s fit on some of the short term wins.

I think that’s exactly what we’ll start with at the next session.

Well, let’s, let’s do that here. You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KBC 790. This is Matt Matern, and we’ll be right right back with Bill Snape in just one minute. You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is my matter. And talking to Bill Snape. And Bill, why don’t you go back to the question I was asking just before the break about the tangible short term targets that we can hit to get some wins on the board here.

Well, sort of like if I were king for a day, right, scary, right? Very few things. So really, again, to not make them too complicated. I put them into three buckets, three major things. The first bucket is we need to have an overarching goal for where we’re going with climate pollutants with greenhouse pollutants. how low do we want to get? What is the goal and we pick the goal and go for it. And that’s the national ambient air quality standards, the next under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Air Act already allows us to do that the President should start that process immediately.

It’s tangible, it would be the blueprint and under which everything would would would work and fall under. So that’s that’s bucket number one. bucket number two is and this has begun to happen with the infrastructure bill, we need to incentivize further incentivize clean, renewable energy. And by clean renewable energy, I don’t mean nuclear. I don’t mean biomass. I mean, mostly solar and wind energy, sometimes geothermal, sometimes hydro, with a healthy dose of batteries, and begin to as the first infrastructure bill did give people not only tax credits, but actual payments for buying these things.

And in fact, you know, one of the long forgotten opening lines of Hillary Clinton’s first debate with Donald Trump, and she didn’t say it again. Afterwards, she wanted to put a solar panel on everyone’s house. And it seems keychain it seems silly. But you know what, that would actually go a long way if we could find a way to do that. At least the houses of course, that gets sun. And then of course, electric cars, we have the capacity of anything that arrogant Elon Musk has told us and showed us is that it’s all doable.

We can have an AI Leakey, Elon, alright, he just sometimes gets he’s a little hypocritical with his view of the economy. But he has shown us and others have seen it. We have this technology for clean electric cars now that are that are fueled by clean, renewable energy, the federal government could start buying those cars tomorrow. And that’s something very tangible solar panels, clean electric cars that they could invest in.

And I think we’re beginning to pick to do some more starting tomorrow. And then lastly, we really do need more resources, the second infrastructure bill that the House of Representatives has already passed, it’s called the build back better bill, it passed with an overwhelming majority. This is the bill that Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Christian cinema from Arizona seem to be holding up right now. That bill needs to pass, that bill would give a lot of resources to help particularly marginalized communities for which this transition could hurt the most get into and enjoy a clean, renewable future.

So those would be the three things that could be then we’re on the present mean, Congress doesn’t agree much. And here we are really close to them passing the second major infrastructure bill the year that could revolutionize how it is we use energy in this country. I mean, it’s worth fighting about. And we’re, as I said, very close.

Let’s start with the first one is as far as the overarching goal of the Clean Air Act and changing the standards there. What type of work does the Biden administration need need to do to set that one up to get it to get it going?

They need to have a proposed rule that is published in the Federal Register, for which they invite public comment and have public hearings from every single sector of society, including the fossil fuel industries. And after a period of time after that proposed rule where they take comment and and come out with some final proposal. It is administrative law 101.

It is something that if they started in January of 2022, they could easily complete by the end of 2024. But it would have to be a priority and that would be mostly out of EPA.

I guess the question is, are you seeing any rumblings because you’re kind of close to the ground zero of Washington DC as to the Biden administration actually doing that.

They seem to be a little bit. still cleaning up the Trump administration message. The Trump administration did a lot of weird legal things to EPA. And so they’re trying to backtrack on settlements that the Trump EPA entered into enforcement decrees that the Trump administration and that are all bad, but I think now that this year is up.

They even for instance, there’s a clean power blurs a Clean Air Act case before the Supreme Court that the Biden administration could get rid of tomorrow if they just withdrew this old Obama rule, but they there. They are not moving fast right now. And I’m hoping that this holiday break this December, will allow them to hit the ground running in January, it is a little disappointing, not to see more out of the out of the Biden EPA so far.

So what kind of kind of pressure or communications can people have to the Biden administration to get them moving on that front? What kind of communications are you having with Biden administration officials to to get the movie on that front?

Well, we have an outstanding petition on the next on the national ambient air quality standards, the Biden administration is aware of that petition. I would say we need grassroots and grasstops pressure to tell the mind administration to treat greenhouse pollutants just like we did lead, just like we did smog, just like we did acid rain, like to make it a priority set a standard and get us below the polluting threshold. And it’s simple. But the problem is that it would actually make the polluters stop polluting, which is why big industry is complaining about it.

So well, it’s the most, it’s the most elegant way to do this is you have to set standards. I mean, if you don’t have a standard, it’s hard to meet it. And it’s hard for us to direct the economy if you don’t have a set standard. So I think it’s, it’s the kind of thing that directs economic decision making. And unfortunately, if you tell big business, you, you have the right to kind of pollute X amount, they’re going to pollute as much as they can, because they basically have no constraint and their competitors will do that.

So they it’s either in a doggy dog world that they either pollute, or they potentially lose their business to somebody else who’s willing to do so. So I think that you kind of have to give them the guidelines because they can’t do it themselves, or they won’t do it themselves, because that’s the nature of the free market. They just won’t happen.

So but going on to point number two, which is we need incentives for clean air wind. You know, I noticed that you left out nuclear and I had a guest on the show recently it was talking about nuclear. And I quite frankly, I think they make a good some good points that nuclear is, at least it’s a netzero type of power source that we could ramp up pretty quickly and given the stakes involved. Why Why shouldn’t we be using nuclear?

Hey, I’m tempted by nuclear to for all the reasons you just said. But there’s two things about nuclear I don’t have an answer for and therefore I, I can’t endorse it. And the Senator has been extremely nervous about endorsing it. The first is what do you do with the waste? Like we still have no answer for that. And we need to have an answer for what we’re doing with nuclear waste. It is it doesn’t go away forever. It’s incredibly toxic. And we still don’t have an answer for that. So that’s issue number one. Issue two is, and I almost lead with this, but I think the nuclear waste issue speaks for itself, it still takes energy to mine uranium.

So yes, once you’re burning the nuclear source, but it takes a lot of energy, just to get it to the point where we’re using that. It just seems to me for all that money. And for all the huge liability that we shield the nuclear industry from it’s the only economic activity that Congress that I’m aware of has said that if you do something really bad, you’ll only be sued for a certain amount. That’s the liability cap with the new. Like, why would we want to take those risks and spend all that money, when we could spend that mount of money and less and have solar wind and battery operated energy that would operate 24/7 and be clean? Like it’s beyond me?

Now the answer that I sometimes get is, well, we don’t have enough critical minerals. But you know, what, we don’t know if we don’t have enough critical minerals, because we’ve never identified what our renewable energy target is and what the renewable what the critical minerals would be that we need to get there. I agree that of every single human being on the earth, 8 billion of us are so had a phone and a lithium car that we would maybe start to, you know, be close to not having enough critical resources and minerals.

But we’re nowhere near that point yet. No one’s saying that we don’t have enough critical minerals. Now, we’re saying that out in the future, we can see that that could be an issue just the same. We can see that oil will not be there forever. So I just see no reason to invest in something like nuclear power that has We’re environmental drawbacks, has harmed people dramatically in the past, and we don’t use a technology that’s already proven, clean, cheap, and all it needs is a mass mobilization. To me, it’s a no brainer to go in the solar wind battery direction.

Well, I probably push back on that, but we have an issue as far as time and, you know, I, I think there are some, some arguments to be made there. But I’m concerned with the build back better plan with the inflation that we’ve got perking up again, if we we pump a bunch more money into this economy, aren’t we likely to get more inflation?

I mean, my undergrad degree was in economics, and that was kind of a Keynesian type model was that if you put too much money from the government side, eventually you’re gonna cook, you’re gonna get the in the economy cooking so hot that we’re going to have more inflation.

Well, we’ve never had that type of virus pandemic that we’ve had. So we’re in very unique economic times. And no one said that when we just passed the trillion dollar Defense Bill, why is it that when we spend money on warships and bombs, it’s okay, but when we spend it on things that might help people tomorrow, it’s not I mean, I hear you.

At some point, we have to stop spending, like there’s no tomorrow, but we’re in a crisis because of COVID. And we already spend that much on other things. Why, like, you know, for half of the Iraqi war, we could have put a solar power on everyone’s house.

Well, I agree with you there that we could have certainly spend that money that we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan much more effectively. And we’d be energy secure right now. Had we had such foresight, but unfortunately, that didn’t occur. So we have to deal with the situation that exists. Bill, it’s been great having you on the show and a lot still probably to cover but really enjoyed it.

And hopefully we’ll have you back in the future to talk about maybe some wins. Maybe you can get the the Biden administration to change the Clean Air Act goals and in the 2022 coming session, so good luck to you on that front. You’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. And we’ll have you back next week.

As you may know, your host Matt Matern of United heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you or 84465449688446544968.