Transition to Alternative Futures

Let's talk a little about hydrogen, because it's a good way to look at a lot of the talents and ways of thinking that you've brought to your work. Hydrogen is an alternative energy source that could really turn things around if we produce the hydrogen in ways that do not produce pollution. Talk a little about that and why hydrogen offers such possibilities.

Well, if you think of renewable hydrogen ... take a windmill. The wind blows a lot at night when you don't need the electricity. If you have an electrolysis plant next to the wind farm and you make hydrogen by using that wind power to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, then you can have renewable hydrogen. You can do the same with solar energy. And, basically, you then have a carbon-free, pollution-free fuel cycle. You then use the hydrogen when you need it to run your car.

My slogan is, "Let the SOBs have their SUVs. You just run them on hydrogen." We take the Hummer and convert it ... instead of running on gasoline, run it on hydrogen. We'd start off with the trucks and the SUVs, which are the gas-guzzlers, and convert them to run on hydrogen. It's not a secret. It's a well-known fact that the internal combustion engine loves hydrogen. We don't have to wait for the fuel cell. But the automobile companies, who don't want to do anything different, are hanging out that fuel cell like the Holy Grail. It reminds me of a dog race. You know, a dog race is that rabbit that you never catch. Well, the rabbit is the fuel cell. In the meantime, we're co-dependent on Saudi Arabia, going to war over oil. And if we get the oil, we're killing ourselves with epidemics, of cancer and all sorts of diseases from the air pollution, not to mention global warming, which will make California the bottom of the sea if we're not careful.

Now, this raises an important issue, which we haven't talked about. We've talked about public education. We've talked about listening to the people. We've talked about alternative ways of doing things, and efficiency. But sometimes you have to "kick butt" too, right? Aren't there entrenched interests that oppose new ways of doing things? In some of your speeches, you suggest that this may be the case with the automobile companies.

Well, the butt-kicking contest usually goes the other way. We're talking about most of the money in this country. It took a law to get a seat belt in the car. It took a law to get catalytic converters on the car system to contain the pollution. It took a law to get the mileage up to what it is today. Averell Harriman once told me that during the beginning of World War II, the automobile companies refused to start making tanks. They kept making cars until finally the president had to order them. These people are not Uncle Sam. They work for their shareholders, as you would expect them to. And then you have the oil industry that's not in love with the idea of cars running on homegrown hydrogen, rather than the imported oil that they have.

So you're up against serious entrenched interests and, unfortunately, money talks. They give a lot of money to members of both parties. I'm hopeful that we have somebody that understands this issue quite well. General Wesley Clark, with whom I had a brief conversation, understands how important our dependency on Saudi Arabia is, and how important it is for us to get off of this extreme dependency on a part of the world that hates us.

So the oil import issue, which used to just be an environmental issue, after 9/11 has become a national security issue. It's time that this was brought to the attention of the people. If Americans could get educated on this issue, then Detroit and Houston can't win. As long as it's just another in a laundry list of issues, it's hard to beat the entrenched interests. But it takes a president. If you can get a president of the United States who wouldn't have sold out to them -- and I'm not saying that George W. Bush sold out in the meanest sense of the word, but he comes from that part of the world. His friends are Halliburton, and his friends are the oil people, and his chief of staff used to represent the automobile industry, Andy Card. So we're up against not just butt-kickers; we're up against real killers.

I'm curious about something, because you brought in the importance of the president and so on. When one goes through your record, and the people who actually listened to you or sought your advice and then acted on it, it's rather strange. Lyndon Johnson was from an oil state. And, yet, it was under him that you did the first inventory.

Yes, but let's be honest about that. Lyndon Johnson named me in December, and in March, he announced that he wasn't running for reelection. So we were just getting started. One of the reasons he didn't want to get into this stuff is, he had to go back to Texas. So, bless his soul, he had good intentions if he could have stayed as president, but we didn't get anything done.

Nixon had an honest science advisor named Lee DuBridge, who asked me to stay on. They were interested in the energy issue, but John Erlichmann told me in June of '71 that if I had any more ideas of the public interest to get the hell out of there because they were going political. So I got out of there. But we did get a message out, and we did get started.

The thing that Nixon did, for which he gets very little credit, was, he was the author of most of the environmental laws, and we did a lot of good there. He was motivated, frankly, by the fact that he thought he was going to run against Muskie in '72, and he wanted a good environmental record. But he deserves credit for the passage of the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Environmental Quality Act, EPA. It was a heyday for [environmentalists], and I was right there in the middle of it.

So what is the key? As you say -- it's something that I read -- "to get bad men to do good things."

You have to take advantage of where you are, but if you can persuade people of the merits of the idea, if you're in a position where you can persuade -- for example, the Ford Foundation report went to Jimmy Carter and he agreed with it. I think that Nixon was motivated by political purposes and not by me. I was just privileged to help implement some of those ideas that had their grassroots in California and throughout the country. It's a combination of trying to place yourself in a position where you can have influence, and then taking advantage of it.

How would you compare Johnson, Nixon, and Carter, three very different presidents, who in many ways did not succeed, the first two on issues of national security, primarily?

Each of those gentlemen did a lot of good things, and one really bad thing that overshadowed all the good that they did. If you eliminate Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson gave us the War on Poverty. He gave us the Department of Education. He did a number of good things and he foresaw an energy problem and brought me in, in December of '67, to start assessing it.

Richard Nixon had Watergate, but aside from Watergate, he's the father of our environmental laws. He opened the door to China. He put in price controls. He was a very pragmatic president, who gets very little credit for anything he did.

So I would say they were failed successes, both of them. They each had one large failure that has just dwarfed all of their successes. I remember one Saturday, my son was down, and we caught Nixon before he got on the airplane. And Stanley and the president shook hands. Then, afterwards, one of the Nixon aides said, "And I bet he's still voting Democratic." So I was known as a Democrat.

What about Carter?

Jimmy Carter was a very different person. He was completely non-political, and it didn't work out very well. The man just did things on the merits. I'm proud of the fact that he thought I was meritorious enough to be named the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was a labor of love, in many ways, but I don't think there's been a president like Carter before or after him. He called in the whole Tennessee Valley delegation and told them he didn't want any suggestions from them; that he had the person he wanted to head the TVA, which ...

It was you.

Yes. But when I got down there, of course they were all angry, indeed, because it was the biggest job in the area and they hadn't had a voice in it. So he was no politician and didn't pretend to be one, but he did what he thought was right. And he was right a lot of the time.

You've never successfully been elected to public office. You did run for the L.A. city council. I'm curious, your political instincts have been honed over the years, right?

Yes, but I hate asking people for money for politics, and I hate knocking on people's doors. I tried running for the Assembly and I just felt like I was intruding on people's privacy when I went door-to-door. It was embarrassing to call old friends and ask them for money. So I got that out of my system. I don't really regret that I came in second, instead of first. I just wanted a taste of it and I got a taste of it. I do have a bit more respect for elected public officials, because you get very naked out there. You really have to expose yourself in an unbelievable way. I didn't mind that as much as this money-raising. I love being in front of an audience and answering questions, or debating. But I just hated the money-raising, and you have to spend half your time or more raising money. I think political reform of the monetary side of elections is essential for real progress in our democracy.

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