You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host and I’ve got a great guest on the program today. Governor Christie Todd Whitman, former governor of the state of New Jersey, also former head of the United States EPA. Welcome to the program. Governor.

Happy to be with you, Matt. Looking forward to it.

Well, just kind of to start off you’ve, you’ve started a new political party, in your free time. And with Andrew Yang, and the forward party, tell us a little bit about the party. And why did you start it?

Certainly, yeah, well, actually, it’s three parties that came together three organizations, two groups that came together, Andrew Yang’s group, the Renew America movement, of which I was part and then David jolly had his Sam group and the three of us, while we didn’t all agree on positions on various issues did agree that our country is in real danger. And our democracy is in real danger. And we need to do something about it.

And that was more important than any differences we might have on specific issues. And so we came together as an effort to try to preserve the democracy and the rule of law, respect for the rule of law and protect the Constitution. And so this is really, it’s, we call it a party, we will be on the ballot in states where we’re now focusing on getting on the ballot and 15 states by the end of this year 30, by the end of next year, and then on the ballot of every state they are after that. But really, we’re trying to encourage people to get back involved.

One of the things that we ask, when people want to become part of it, the things that we are standing for, besides what everybody can agree on, because we have a broader approach. This is where everyone wants to have economic security and ability to earn money. People want to feel safe. People want to protect their democracy, and we want to open the process.

So the other thing that we’re doing is saying that, if you want to join us want to be part of us, one of the things we’re going to ask you to work toward is open primaries and rank choice voting ways to give everyone a voice. Because Matt there over 500,000 elective offices across this country, 70% of them are uncontested. That’s just wrong, people should have a choice.

And what we’re doing is we’re saying, Look, if you have a candidate from either party, who says that they believe in those things, they will, upon getting office at whatever level that they will move to encourage or drop a bill that supports open primaries and rank choice voting, then we’ll support you Republican, Democrat, Independent, we’re not fighting to be a spoiler.

We’re not fighting to be the old kind of party that says you have to belong to us. What we’re saying is we want people who believe in the system.

Well, certainly I am for rank choice voting. And it’s kind of ironic that San Francisco has rank choice voting yet Governor Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco vetoed rank choice voting here in the state of California, when a Democratic majority had had put it through the legislature.

And he said it was too complicated. I guess it’s it’s simple enough for people in San Francisco, but people down in Los Angeles can understand it.

Well, Alaska seems to like it. Maine has had it for quite a while it’s it’s building across the country. And the important thing about it is it does, what we’ve seen happen is the two parties that duopoly have such control, that most people just don’t feel comfortable with either party, they don’t feel they have an opportunity to really participate in make a difference.

And what we want to do is tell them, No, you can. And you, we’re creating a way for you to do that by ensuring that there will be a third or a second candidate, at least in all those races where you only have to one right now, which is just unacceptable. And then in other races where there are extremes only extremes running, then we will put somebody in those races, but we’re not in traditional parties always think about the federal offices.

We’re concentrating on those 500,000 at all levels across the country. And the interesting thing we’ve been, I guess we started What about less than a month ago, maybe three weeks, really and announcing ourselves? We already have 45 states there 99 active heads organizing in 45 of the states. And those are last week’s numbers and the way things are changing. It could be very different and more now we have over almost 23,000 volunteers not just people that have reached out and so they have an interest.

That’s how For 200,000, who have gone to the site and read, you’ve given us their emails, because they’re interested, but the the 23,000 are really active volunteers. And we’ve had, what our state people are doing is they’re they’re holding groups together, holding meetings, bringing people together from all walks of life and saying, Okay, why do you support this? Let’s, what are our next steps? What can we do and there have been over almost 5000 people have already attended meetings like this.

We’re going to start in Houston, we being the main party, Andrew Yang, and I and David jolly will be in Houston, and September 24, to have a open public meeting to listen to people who say, what, what is the problem that’s most important to you in your community? Not what Washington says it is. But what do you say it is? And how do you want to approach this problem?

What do you think is the right way to approach it? And then we’re going to have a convention sometime this next summer. And we’ll develop a platform, but the platform is not going to be like the traditional platform you see today, of the parties, because they now try to delineate your how you have to believe on every single subject, you know, you have to be pro climate change, or you can’t be a Democrat, you have to be all pro life to be a Republican.

That’s not what we want. We want a party that can encompass everybody and say, Look, you can have different opinions on those. The big things are the things we care about protecting our democracy, protecting the Constitution, economic opportunity for everybody, safety at home, strong national security. Those are the main things and then open primaries, rank choice voting. And let’s start there.

Well, that’s, that would be a great start. I applaud your efforts, governor, and I harken back to George Washington, who said that political parties are something to be concerned about. And he was not a fan of political parties. And I think it runs against the principle of let’s have the best idea win versus the strongest party win. And you may have the best idea on something, and I may have the best idea on something else.

But we should vote on the principles rather than the personalities. One commentator had said that the two most political, the two most powerful corporations in the United States are the Republican and Democratic Party. And I think there’s some truth in that. I mean, they set the tone and tenor for trillions of dollars and our whole economy is based upon decisions made by the political parties. We need kind of less dysfunctional system going forward.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, they’re not as if they’re not interested in solving problems. They’re interested in continuing to get elected. And that’s where we’re falling down. I mean, we used to have a time when you’d have Republicans and Democrats and they’d be they can argue, in the well of the Senate or floor of the house. And then they go out and have a drink and say, Okay, now we got to solve this problem. How are we going to do it? And they talk to one another, we’ve lost that now. People don’t do it.

Right. I mean, well, one harkens back to the days when, when the EPA was created in the early 70s. And it was pretty much unanimous, every United States senator voted in favor of the EPA. I mean, when was the last time something like that happen, or when Clean Air Act was also broad bipartisan support.

And then George HW Bush signed into law, the second Clean Air Act, and then somehow, both lost. They were Republican presidents working with largely Democrat congresses. Certainly it was true for Richard Nixon in establishing the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Drinking Water Act, and establishing the Environmental Protection Agency.

He was working with a Democratic Congress. And those were the times when people understood that the oath of office they took was terribly important, and that’s what they were about to serve the people and to deal with the major problems. We haven’t tried to solve them. That’s not happening anymore, unfortunately. Well,

I guess, where are we at in terms of getting rank choice voting? You know, in place and other states, you mentioned a few states, that habit. Maine is one of them. In Alaska, how are we looking as far as getting that enacted and others state?

Well, as I said, we’ve just started but we already have these 250,000 people who have evidenced an interest. We have our leaders in 45 states, our 99 leaders, because some states have two and three leaders. And that’s what they’re working toward, and starting to let their representatives know these are going to be the issues we’re going to be questioning you want.

And if you don’t have the right answer for us, we’re not going to vote for you. Well, I would lay down a challenge for your governor, to put that on the ballot as a proposition in the state of California and let the people make a choice here, since the governor seems to have thwarted the will of the people by vetoing this bill that was put before him in the last few years.

Oh, absolutely. Well, we’re working. We’re working across the country right now. We don’t have formal party recognition. And most in any state at the moment. As I said, we’re working at about 15 By the end of this year. So what we’re doing is supporting candidates, Republican, Democrat, Independent, who are standing up for the things about which we care.

Okay, well, you’re listening to A Climate Change. I’ve got Christie Todd Whitman, former governor of the state of New Jersey, also former head of the EPA on the show today, and we’ll be right back in just a minute to talk to former governor Whitmer about some of the issues facing the nation.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, and I’ve got Governor Christie Todd Whitman, former governor of the state of New Jersey on the program. And Governor, we’re talking about political parties and the problems in the current political structure.

I harken back to the days of the Republican Party when the Endangered Species Act was authored by a Republican out here in California. And, you know, that was you. So you had people who were on all ends of the spectrum, kind of the Republican Party, they could be very liberal on environmental issues, yet 20 conservatives kind of on fiscal issues. And I think that the country needs that kind of somebody who is environmentally conscious, but also watching the store in terms of what we’re spending on it.

And I feel like the Republicans have abdicated the field on the issue of environmentalism and how we should be doing it in a, in a kind of a business like way, so that we’re managing our funds. We’re doing it effectively, and not only just with our hearts, we need to be doing it with our heads. Absolutely. I mean, the environment was a Republican issue. It was the first land public land set aside was somebody by Abraham Lincoln.

And then as we discussed before, you have Richard Nixon, with establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, then you had George HW Bush, and the Clean Air Act. Revival, as it were, the amendments to the Clean Air Act, and even George W. Bush, we got some things done in that administration that helped with the Environment, Water, particularly being an issue in brownfield sites. Republicans, this used to be our issue.

But since the parties have gotten to the point where every issue is looked on, as how does this give me an advantage over the other party, and it doesn’t give me an advantage if I’m willing to work with them or talk to them. So I’ve got to stake out a position that is clearly delineated, and that you either believe it or you don’t, and that’s giving me something to run on.

Rather than saying, I’m going to run on a platform of getting things done, and solving these problems because they’re huge problems as we know, I mean, what California is facing what I have a home where I go to for four months in the winter down in Arizona, the water issues there are enormous, New Mexico everybody off the Colorado River is having real real issues. Besides the fact that Lake Mead keeps throwing up these bodies that find their you know, climate change is real here in the in the East and the Northeast, we’ve Our climate is changing.

We have live on a farm where organics regenerative but you have to change what you plant in the springtime but as we get such heavy rains in the springtime now we’re just beginning to come out of a drought that is needed so the farmers can’t get the second cutting of of hay.

You know, things are changing and when you have to rely on Mother Nature for your livelihood for farmers. That’s really tough and that’s affecting the Midwest who saw and the west you saw early on this summer where a lot of ranchers were selling off cattle early because they did didn’t have the feed, to be able to keep them going.

They didn’t have the grasslands. So this is something that’s affecting all of us. It’s not Mother Nature doesn’t care if you’re Republican, Democrat, conservative, independent, liberal. It’s hitting all of us. And we need to understand that and take action. And I would think today, with all this been going on, and everything we’ve been seeing that that would be a no brainer. But unfortunately, we still, we still have people who are, are denying.

Yeah, I kind of feel like I would be remiss and not asking you this question by the historical record is that you were the EPA chair or the head of the EPA, secretary of the EPA, during the George W. Bush era, for the first couple of years, and you resign that post. And it had been written that some of that was based upon problems that you had with Dick Cheney, who was vice president at the time trying to get through what you believe were environmental reforms that were sensible, necessary, and him kind of standing in the way.

And I kind of mark that period of time is Cheney kind of backing more of the fossil fuel industry, because he was from Halliburton, and walking the Republican Party away from its environmentalism. And it continued kind of to this day walking in the wrong direction for the most part. I mean, obviously, it’s more complex than that. But that’s kind of what it looks like, to me is a bit of a an observer here.

Well, unfortunately, had it started before then. But you are right. I mean, when I first we get back to California, again, when I first went into office, it was when California was back then having rolling brownouts, the kinds of things you’re facing now. And there were real worries that there were going to be blackouts. And so the President set up a task force on energy, and made Vice President Cheney, the chair of that.

And my very first meeting that I went into, there were two things that were going on one, they were trying to take away part of the Clean Air Act from the Environmental Protection Agency and give it to the Department of Energy, which since no way you’re going to do that any virus successfully fought that one off. But the second thing is they said, well, all the problems in California were due to EPA regulations, that were stopping utilities from moving forward with new sources of energy.

So what I said is, look, give me the list of the projects that have been held up, but there’s an EPA regulation, and we’ll move them to the front of the line, they still have to go through all the hoops. So I have to make sure that they’re there, right. But we’ll move them faster, we’ll move them as fast as we can. Because of the crisis, they never came back with one, there wasn’t a single one, it was an economic decision by the utilities not to build new power plants at that point.

And so, you know, there’s been this idea that you can’t have a clean and green environment and a thriving, healthy, thriving economy. And that’s just wrong. I mean, we’ve proven that over and over again, that we can enforce our environmental regulations and grow our economy. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. And now we have an enormous opportunity.

With all the new technologies that are coming, we can be at the forefront of renewable energy, we can be at the forefront, I happen to be a believer in nuclear energy, especially small modular reactors, and smoke and so on a Molten Salt Reactors, fusion that’s starting to look as if maybe they’re going to capture the energy for longer than a nanosecond. So there are all sorts of things going on. And we can we can do this, and we can do it well and help grow the economy.

Well, certainly that is the case. And I mean, it’s undisputed that California is the fifth largest economy in the world, and we have some of the most stringent environmental regulations, certainly in the United States, if not the, on the planet. So obviously, the economy was able to grow over the last 50 years, even with more stringent environmental regulations here than in other parts of the country.

So it’s a it’s just an inaccurate statement that environmental regulations are going to impede, you know, growing economy and in a lot of ways it fuels us for the future is that the future of the world economy is a greener economy. And and the past is the fossil fuel industry and continuing to invest in kind of the dinosaur technology is going to leave us as dinosaurs because China is investing in a big way in environmentally friendly technology because they’re smart enough to recognize that is the way of the world.

And to the extent we don’t get that message where we’re going to leave the playing field to them. But moving back kind of to the political front here, in terms of what do you see is changing the political dynamic by by having this your forward party injected in to local races, choice, giving people a choice, giving them the opportunity, because what you’re seeing today is, people are not voting in primaries, particularly, because they don’t want to associate with either party, they and the choices they’re given they feel are too extreme.

So they’re, they’re not bothering to vote until very recently, with the average voter turnout in the primary was 10%. That that’s just appalling. A and B, it means you’re letting the most partisan people choose your choices, make your choices for you for the fall. And so it’s not surprising when they come to the fall elections, people are looking and saying, Well, I don’t like either of these candidates, I’m not going to vote. And it’s been tradition that you get about 35% turnout 34% turnout on Congress’s the top of the ticket.

And we think we’ve done a really great job if you get over 54% for presidential and when you look around the world at countries that haven’t had the opportunity to choose their leaders, and how they will spend, and I’ve been in observed enough and different countries, as part of official observers to see this happen. They’ll stand in line for hours in rain, and a cold, just to get that opportunity to pick their own leaders. And we started taking for granted.

So what we want to do is give people a choice. So they will feel they have a voice, that there’s reason to get out there and vote and then they’ll start to talk to one another, hopefully. And if you open the primaries, so they’re open primaries, and you have rank choice voting, then it really does mean something.

Well, I do believe that getting candidates at the grassroot level, and for what are seen as not the glamorous jobs in politics, like the Water Board, or things of that nature, are incredibly important for people to get engaged. And I feel like if there was any silver lining to the Trump presidency, maybe it was to wake us up that hey, if we were getting the democracy we deserve are the candidates we deserve?

Because we’re too asleep. And I I feel like it woke me up from a kind of a disengaged standpoint to being more engaged, because if he was going to be the candidate, I really needed to work hard to prevent this from happening.

Yeah, so we’re, as we’re starting at that grassroots level, that’s where our focus is. There are others that are really focused on the presidency, who knows what happens in 2024. And if we had a candidate and it was Donald Trump, but if it was Donald Trump against Joe Biden, we probably wouldn’t play. We’d let that happen because we don’t want to be a spoiler.

Well, I think that that’s a wise position. You’re listening to A Climate Change, my guest, Governor Christie Todd Whitman, we’ll be back in just one minute.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, and I’m back with Governor Christie Todd Whitman, who was former governor of state in New Jersey, one of the first women governors in in the country. Tell us a little bit about that, and what it was like to jump into that position and lead a state and face all the challenges that it takes to Governor’s a major state.

Well, it was an incredible, incredible opportunity. And I was really fortunate and blessed to be able to do it. I know everybody says I’m the first woman elected in the state of New Jersey, which is fine, but to me from a political perspective, what was more important is that I was the first person to beat an incumbent Democrat in a general election since the Constitution had been redone and rewritten in 1949 4749.

I can’t remember now. That was the political side of it. In New Jersey, governorship, when I was there was the most powerful of the 50 states. Others are catching up a bit, because the governor of New Jersey appoints is the only statewide elective office. When I was governor. There was no even lieutenant governor. They now have one but that person is chosen by the gubernatorial candidate of the party and they run together as a team, but you appoint all the prosecutors all the judges.

It’s a very powerful position you appoint the Secretary of State the treasurer, so they’re all on your team. If so, if you don’t, if you don’t get things done, people know where to go to ask I mean, obviously you you work with, you have to get things through that the assembly and the House and the Senate, but you still have a pretty powerful team. And I also have something that while I was governor nobody else had, which was called a conditional detail, almost every governor had a line item veto, which means that in the budget, you can rewrite any portion of it.

And they have to take some two thirds vote to override you. And the governor of New Jersey also certified that revenue. So you could say what you thought they were going to be, we can’t play with that too much. Because you could really get caught if you if you were too optimistic, by the conditional veto meant that on any piece of legislation, as long as you stayed within the parameters of the intent of the bill, you could take, you could rewrite it and it took a two thirds vote to override.

So it made you it gave you a lot of power, but a huge amount of responsibility, as well. And I was lucky to have a very good team. And we had no scandals, nobody went to prison, nobody was questioned. None of that went on. And we got some really good things done. So it was really an honor to be able to do it. And moving to being a member of the President’s cabinet was very different. But obviously, although I had an advantage of having known what bout a cabinet because I had my own cabinet.

So I realized I didn’t, I wasn’t the one that was elected. And it wasn’t up to me to make the policy, it was up to me to give my best advice to the President as to what issues I thought were the most critical and how to go forward and his agenda, what I thought made sense that he wanted to, that he wanted to get done and how to get it done.

And so it was very different. It was an honor to serve nationally, because I was termed out as governor of New Jersey. It’s two consecutive terms. And so I was in the last year of my second term, when I left, right.

Well, I turned into your experience at EPA, George W. Bush had had run on a platform, as I recall, of reducing greenhouse gases. And I think then the Cheney influence kind of kicked in and he kind of poo pooed it later as he became president. What kind of internal dialogue or fights were there about that? And how did that play out?

Well, it got a little awkward for me at one point. Because the President I when I talked to him before I accepted the position, we were in the same place. And he had run as governor of Texas, he had put a cap on carbon, it was part of his platform as president during the campaign. And so when I was getting ready to go to my first G8 Environmental ministers g8 meeting in Italy, I said to everybody in the in the White House, I said Look, we’re not going to sign Kyoto I get that I was as a governor, I wouldn’t have signed it either.

And I’d said that because I thought it was a flawed document. But we need to do something here. And I want to say that we will we may not. Right, right now signed Kyoto or joined Kyoto, but we will put a cap on carbon. And everybody said, Fine. That was okay, went all the way up the chain, that was going to be fine. So I get over there. And I say that it wasn’t a surprise to anybody, because Bill Clinton hadn’t even taken the Kyoto Protocol, protocol to the hill because he already had done a preliminary kind of voted 95 to nothing.

I mean, no Democrats were touching this, no republicans were touching it. So it wasn’t a surprise to the other nations. But when they heard that we were going to put a cap on carbon that made it feel better. And as if we were taking this issue very seriously. Well, I get back, and all of a sudden, I’m calling to the White House. And no, we’re not, we’re not going to put a cap on carbon, because there have been some of the members, Republican members of the hill and decided that I was going rogue, and that I was trying to sneak in the Kyoto Protocol.

And the Vice President wasn’t happy with having my saying so publicly that we were going to put a cap on carbon and reminding people of the campaign pledge. So he persuaded the president to write to the Hill to Chuck Hagel, who had written a letter to him expressing his concerns and said, No, we’re not, don’t worry, we’re not. We’re not even going to put a cap on carbon.

And so that I had to go back and call my fellow ministers and say, you know, gee, what I told you last week, not happening was not the position I really wanted to find myself in, but unfortunately, that’s where they ended up and that’s what the administration wanted.

So that that really is an unfortunate turn that the Republican Party took because I think it I think, narrowed the base of the Republican Party from people who are You know, I had been more active or certainly considered myself a more staunch member of the party at up until that point in time.

And as the party kind of disavowed its environmental history, then it lost me. In part, more and more, I felt like, hey, my views are not being taken seriously. i What was becoming a more and more important issue. I mean, it wasn’t that the environment was less important in 2000, than it was in 1980. But it seemed as though the Cheney wing had kind of won that along with the Koch brothers.

Well, it was a it was a tough sledding on that one. And one of the things I insisted that we do at the agency is that we develop a report card on the state of the environment, simply because I thought, How do we know if we’re making progress, but we don’t know where you start. So we ought to take a look at the environment, see where we are. And to the extent we can measure the progress that we’ve made to date, because we knew where we started, let’s get that all done.

And the the career people really worked hard. And it was an excellent, excellent document, except when it came to climate change. And then the President the language, I’d send it over to the White House, and they kept sending it back. And they had language that we want, they wanted us to use in there that, to my mind would have totally undercut the the other researchers, the quality of the other researcher would have called it into question, because it was just wrong the language they wanted to use.

So we ended up just putting in a phrase saying, okay, climate change is a major issue, here are the latest studies. And that was it. That’s all we said about it, rather than anything more than that. And that was, to me a big disappointment, because it was an opportunity to really lay out some of the facts about climate change them and to, to give people a base from which to judge how we were doing and the seriousness of it, but we didn’t have that opportunity.

Right, I saw an interview of Paul Volcker done a few years ago, and he talked about the importance of the competency of our government, workers and drawing in the most competent people, and that we haven’t done a very good job over the last few decades of kind of giving some more credit to those government workers.

And that he said that many people who came from a business background who came and then served in government were very surprised many times that, wow, these people who are working in government are actually fairly talented. So what was your, you know, take away from working at the working with the officials and the scientists at EPA and their skill set?

Well, I mean, everybody was telling me all the Republicans going in, Oh, watch out, they’re all tree huggers, they hate Democrat Republicans, they’re gonna undermine you, you’re not gonna get anything done. And I found that were there some of those guests, there were some diehard Democrats who have never gonna let a Republican get credit for anything, but they were in the minority, the people at EPA, they may not always agree have agreed with how we wanted to solve a problem.

But as long as they thought you honestly wanted to solve that problem. They’ve worked with you, they might have chosen a different way to address the issue. But as long as they were convinced that you really did want to go at it, because you know, EPA isn’t mission is very simple, is to protect human health and the environment.

And they believe it is the agency has about the longest serving staff of any department or agency in the federal government. They just stay there because they believe so much in the mission. And they are dedicated to it. And they’re willing to work with people from to have different approaches to the issues as long as they’re working on the issues that they see to be the critical ones to protect human health and the environment.

Well, certainly, that’s something that I believe should be played up more. And I think, Paul Volcker made a great point on on crediting our civil servants, who are doing great work in the trenches and trying to empower them to to do competent work. To because that is the why some trust in government is lost is when competency is not taken care of.

And in part, I feel like a number of the elected officials are less than competent. Donald Trump would be the, the arch example of somebody who has no interest in government or reading about it or becoming proficient in, in the functioning of government. So you think, right, I mean, there were stories that he wouldn’t even read the one page briefing papers that were given to him on a daily basis that covers on those books were never even cracked to even look at one page.

Well, picture of him on it.

Yeah, maybe maybe that was the problem. They should have had pictures of him on everything. But you’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, I’ve got got Governor Christie Todd Whitman on the program. And we’ll be back in just one minute.

You’re listening to A Climate Change? This is Matt Matern, your host, and I have Governor Christie Todd Whitman, former governor of the state of New Jersey, and Governor you had worked pretty substantially on the nuclear power issue. And that being a way to cut greenhouse gases?

Where do you see us on that front? We we’re generating roughly 20% of our power from nuclear across the country. Are we going to increase that? Is it gonna go down? What do you see happening over the next 10-20 years?

Well, you know, it’s hard to predict. But I certainly don’t see us building any more new large reactors, that’s just not going to happen. But with a new technology, the SMR is a small modular reactors, they offer a faster, safer way to build nuclear reactors and faster deployment of them the ability to put them in places where you don’t have the infrastructure of the grid there to take care of towns and cities or businesses.

And so I’m hoping that we’ll see some of that because it is the only form of base power that releases no greenhouse gases, or other regulated pollutants while it’s producing power. And I think you saw in California, when you close down the sound enough for a nuclear reactor that actually your air quality suffered, and the cost of your energy went up. And you’re certainly seeing that in across the country of the world. Now in Europe, particularly with the Ukrainian situation and gas Pro.

You’re seeing that the Germans even are beginning to come back to nuclear, they stopped it because of the heavy anti nuclear green vote that Angela Merkel was facing. So she started to close down on nuclear reactors, with Francis bringing them back. Germany’s looking at bringing them back. It doesn’t help that you have this reactor in the Ukraine that the Russians are now occupying. Because that just brings to mind all the the things that scare tactics, everything that people tell you that can go wrong with nuclear.

And certainly they can I mean, there’s no question except that nuclear has a amazingly safe record overall. And certainly, in this country, our Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the gold standard for the world. I mean, we never would have built or Chernobyl that kind of technology never would have been built in this country at any point in time. And what happened at Fukushima Daiichi was not because of the earthquake, it was because of the tidal wave. And that was because they had co located the backup generator in the building with the reactor.

And our Nuclear Regulatory Commission, actually, after 911 told all the utilities that they had to move their reactors, I mean, their generators away from the reactor, so you would never have that kind of thing. And people get upset and worried as a not surprisingly, and they should, about the rods. But to date, if you took all the spent rods from at one point, we had 102 nuclear reactors, and put them in the end, they fill up one football field to the height of the goalposts.

That’s it, you’re not talking about something that would cover the entire state. And both in in Japan and in France, they have developed a technology to reprocess that energy, because you’d have between 95 and 97% fissionable energy left in those rods, but they figured out how to reprocess to capture that energy and use it again and reduce what’s left to to 10% at most. And that would be never, they can treat it so could never be used in a nuclear weapon.

And nuclear the process for producing nuclear power is very different than what’s required for a nuclear weapon. You can’t just take a rod and stick it in a in a weapon. It doesn’t work that way. So there are a lot of reasons when you start to talk to people about it. Let them ask their very legitimate questions. And I think they’re good answers for most of them that people get comfortable with it again, but we’re never going to see a big boom in nuclear.

Although perhaps with the small modular reactors or the Molten Salt Reactors Canada is now deploying those across the country, or the Molten Salt Reactors, less expensive than the nuclear reactors that we built in the US.

They are less expensive, they’re smaller, they’re less expensive, they’re safer. They’re faster again. But it’s a whole different process. And they’re, they’re working through getting the okay from our regulatory commission. But they haven’t completed that process yet.

Yeah, I had guest Michael Shallenberger on the program about a year ago, and he was a pretty strong advocate for nuclear power. And, quite frankly, he kind of convinced me as to why I that makes sense for us right now to, to keep it in the mix, because of the fact that it is a zero emission technology and the safety of it is, is very high. And we’ve really not suffered problems in the US related to the use of nuclear power, because we’ve regulated it pretty well, as, as you’ve said, it’s a bridge, it’s a bridge to win, we can have total green power, but we don’t have that yet.

We haven’t yet figured out how really to store the power. So it’s 24/7 of the of the renewables. We are based it’s not based power, yet, we need it to be base power, not peak shaving. And so it’s a bridge. It’s not the total answer forever. I don’t, I don’t advocate that. But we need something that’s going to get us to where we want to be in a clean way.

And that’s the cleanest that I know of, well, let’s, let’s switch back to the new party that you’re creating the forward party and how listeners can get involved in that I often think that something like 70% or more of Americans would probably agree on the majority of issues facing the country.

And it’s the 15% on either extreme edge of both parties, that that are driving the issues and keep us from agreeing on the 70% of things that we could agree on. And tell us how how people can get engaged and work with the new party you’re creating to help help find that consensus?

Well, first of all, you’re absolutely right. And every poll shows that we on the issues themselves, we agree more than we disagree. It’s just that as you say that 15% on either side is keeping us apart and convincing us that no, we don’t.

And you’ve got to really hate the person who doesn’t agree with you. But what people can do is just go to forward, look it up, Google it, and you will see a place to put your email. And once you’ve said you’re interested in it, if you really are you’ll be put in touch immediately with someone in your state who is organizing, we are careful about the people that we engage with have to make sure that they’re you know, they really do believe in what we believe in, and they’re ready to work at it.

But you don’t have to be a leader if you don’t want to if you just want to know what’s going on and to end to watch it. And so that’s the thing to do. Just go to the internet look up Forward, forward party. Remember, it’s not left, it’s not right. It’s forward. That’s our motto.

Well, that’s, that’s a good motto. And I think it’s something that we can all focus on as citizens trying to solve problems. I mean, to me being practical here. And that’s what has gotten lost in in the last number of years is, is just practical solving, problem solving.

Now, I think we’ve seen a little bit of it in the Biden presidency, that he’s gotten a few things across the goal line that work that were practical. So what do you say to the naysayers who say, Hey, you’re just creating a distraction from, you know, the the work that he’s been doing that has been constructive?

Not at all, we applaud that we applaud the stuff that’s getting through that does solve some of these problems. Again, we’re talking about the 500,000 elections, that there are across the country, elective offices, we’re starting at the grassroots, and we will support whenever there is a chance to have to the two parties work together to get something major across.

It’s not to take away it doesn’t take away from anybody. And what you want to say is Well, How well has the party system overall been working for you lately? How well, other issues on the whole host of issues that we’re facing? Are you really comfortable that this is enough, we support it, but we’re also saying that there’s a lot more that needs to be done.

And what we want to do is provide a way for people to get start to get together to talk to one another to start looking at what are the problems in their communities and how do they want to solve them and understanding they can have an impact. I mean, a lot of people don’t realize that, that you know, you are the ones this is about you you elect these people and you can control it. They don’t realize for instance that redistricting is up to the various states.

And so if you don’t like the way districts are being drawn, you go go with your state legislators. And you tell them that and you say your vote is going to depend on that. But again, I think with rank choice voting and open primaries, a lot of that will go will not be, it won’t be relevant anymore. Even in a, in a bright red or bright blue district. If you have open primaries, those, the silent majority are the silent people who don’t bother to vote because they’re not at that party, or they don’t like that choice will come out, because they have will have other choices.

And that’s really what we’re about. We wanted to get the public, once again, engaged in the process, because it’s all about us. And as you pointed out, the very beginning our founding fathers were very worried about parties. I mean, it was, I don’t know whether he said it at a dinner party or whether he said it when walking down the street. But Ben Franklin, when asked what kind of government Have you have you given us? He said, a republic, if you can keep it.

And that’s what’s motivating all of us who are part of forward is that if you can keep it because we’re on a precipice right now. And we’re very close to losing what we’ve got. And it’s too important, not just to this country, but to the world. We matter in the world.

Right? We certainly need to set a good example. And certainly we haven’t been setting as good of an example as we should. For sure, but I have been somewhat heartened by some profiles and courage in the Republican Party like Mitt Romney and others that have stood up for the right thing. But we haven’t seen enough of that, and quite frankly, that that’s been disheartening that we have your back.

And that’s what we’re going to do for those people too. For those people, we say we have your back. We’ll be there for you, because you’re the kind of elected representative we want.

Well, Governor, it was a pleasure having you on and I wish you all the success with the forward party that you’ve launched, and we will look forward to having you back on the program at some time in the future and hear about your successes in the coming year.

Okay, great. I look forward to that. Thank you.

Thank you, well you’re listening to A Climate Change, and our guest today was Governor Christie Todd Whitman, former governor state of New Jersey and former head of the EPA, pleasure having you and have a wonderful day, Governor.

You too.