Green Tech

NOTE: This is a transcript of a segment of 60 Minutes that aired Sunday.

President-elect Obama is 30 days from office. For a window on his future, turn west for a moment, to a chief executive who is already up to his neck in the nation's troubles.

This month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger warned of financial Armageddon, as California faced a potential $40 billion deficit that threatened jobs, roads, schools, and public safety. At the same time, he's pushing some of the world's toughest environmental laws to make California a leader on climate change.

The governor agreed to take 60 Minutes along during his most challenging times. How does he deal with it all? Well, what would you expect a former action hero to say?

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"The more difficult it gets, the more joy I find in it. Because it's just great to figure out all of the ways of bringing people together and shaping policy. But to get it done, to get there, is always a long process. But when you get it done, it's very satisfying," Gov. Schwarzenegger told correspondent Scott Pelley.

Maybe it was acting. When 60 Minutes met Schwarzenegger at the state Capitol in Sacramento, he had just declared a state of emergency. His budget plan touched off a political firestorm, which in California would, of course, be accompanied by a real one.

Schwarzenegger and Pelley visited one Los Angeles neighborhood burned to ashes just weeks before--evidence to Schwarzenegger that even in these times, the greatest threat is climate change. "It all happened so fast, they couldn't save one single one of those homes. Over 500 homes here were destroyed within hours," Schwarzenegger explained, as they walked through charred remains.

"You know, there's been a lot of research that suggests that there are more fires, and there are hotter fires, because the fire season has been extended by climate change," Pelley remarked.

"Well, we have been doing some research in that, and we have seen the changes. We don't have a fire season anymore. It starts in the beginning of the year and goes all year around, and so it has created, of course, big challenges," the governor said.

Asked what he tells someone who says climate change is theoretical and questions the harm, Schwarzenegger told Pelley, "I always say, well, there were people that were debating over if the world is a globe. They thought for a long time it was flat. And there are still people who think that it's flat. And there are people that still live in the Stone Age."

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SAN MATEO, Calif.--How does Dow Chemical, the world's second-largest chemical producer, turn itself into a sustainable business?

"It's where green meets green," Neil Hawkins, vice president of sustainability at the company, said here Tuesday at the opening of the two-day Dow Jones Environmental Ventures conference.

Hawkins, who was interviewed in a morning keynote address, was referring to the 110-year-old company's efforts to make money by being more energy-efficient, investing in new clean-tech technologies, and working with manufacturers on new green chemistry.

For example, from 1994 to 2005, Dow spent roughly $1 billion on refining its energy efficiency practices. That investment has paid off fivefold for Dow, Hawkins said. Since 1990, Dow has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent, surpassing guidelines set by the Kyoto Protocol. And going forward, Dow has set sustainability goals by 2015 for chemistry, climate change, and product safety.

The idea can seem discombobulating, considering that Dow is known for producing the chemical weapon napalm during the Vietnam War, as well as toxic pesticides that have caused sterility in men. Hawkins acknowledged that the company isn't green yet, but he said there are pockets of green throughout the 47,000-employee conglomerate.

"The Dow of today is focused on delivering solutions to the world's problems...in clean drinking (water), alternative energy, alternative feedstock, and public health," said Hawkins, who has been with Dow for 20 years.

The company, for example, has a unit called Dow Building Solutions, in which it is examining new technologies that can help business owners reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. The company produces a Styrofoam insulation that has received an Energy Star recommendation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example.

He said the most exciting area Dow is looking at in building tech is photovoltaic technology for roofing and siding. The company is working on bringing costs down for the technology to those of comparable levels of the grid. "In the short term, the single most important thing we can do is improve CO2 (emissions) in buildings...where people are doing a lot more insulating."

Dow also has its own venture fund, with $500 million invested in public health, clean technology, and water products, according to Hawkins. He said the company is looking for the right partnerships.

For example, the company has invested in WaterHealth International, a San Francisco Bay Area for-profit that has developed a water system that has provided drinking water to 10 million people in India, according to Hawkins. He said that in addition to an investment, Dow has provided loan guarantees of $30 million to help the company's growth.

It has also teamed with the nongovernmental organization International Aid, which has developed a plastic filter for drinking water. With that technology, nearly 2 million people in the Sudan and Cambodia will get access to potable water, he said.

Dow is also involved in U.S. Climate Action Partnerships (USCAP), a collaboration of environmental groups and companies aimed at shifting U.S. policy on climate change.

"The existence of USCAP has really moved this administration and Congress to have us participate in a more friendly policy," he said.

The company is also trying to help customers with sustainability efforts. For example, he said, Dow is thinking of new battery technology for Toyota's future initiatives.

"This trend of sustainability is very real. It will impact our profit for the next 20 years," he said. "I'm hoping to lead a culture change."

Shellenberger: Most are wrong about how to stall global warming.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel/CNET Networks)

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Al Gore is wrong about how to stave off ecological catastrophe. So is President George W. Bush. But don't look to Europe or clean-tech entrepreneurs to save the planet either; neither regulations nor free market capitalism alone will prevent the fast and furious acceleration of global warming.

That's according to Michael Shellenberger, who with Ted Nordhaus in 2004 proclaimed the "Death of Environmentalism" in a notorious essay that infuriated people of nearly every political stripe and argued that the tactics of mainstream "green" groups were off the mark.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus run the Breakthrough Institute, a progressive research group. In October they published Break Through, which urges the public and private sectors to invest every effort to boost the clean-energy sector.

"We do have to get rid of the mythology of Silicon Valley a little bit here. How did it start? "Well, it all started in Bill Hewlett's garage. The reality is HP wouldn't exist if they hadn't gotten a Pentagon contract for their radios."

Speaking at the Energy Crossroads conference at Stanford University Thursday, Shellenberger cited recent figures from Australian economist Peter Sheehan suggesting that greenhouse gas emissions must level off or begin to decline as soon as 2020. That's a much more ambitious goal than that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which pegged 2050 as the time frame in which global emissions need to be under control.

To achieve the goal of the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC, every year the world would need the equivalent of 30 new nuclear plants; 17,000 wind turbines; 400 biomass plants, two Three Gorges-sized hydroelectric dams, and 42 coal or natural gas plants that capture and store carbon, according to the International Energy Agency.

Sheehan says those developments need to happen, but at a faster pace, saying emissions grew more than 3 percent between 2000 and 2005, not by 1.6 percent as the IPCC estimated.

The carbon pollution set to rise from China, India, and other developing nations within the next several decades is likely to dwarf improvements made by the developed world, Shellenberger noted. For instance, energy use in China in 2006 was 15 percent higher than its government projected for 2010.

And don't give Europe too much credit for being clean and green. Its emissions rose 1 percent per year between 2000 and 2005, double the speed of those in the United States. Plus, Europe's greenhouse gases jumped a staggering 10 percent between 1990 and 2005, not counting Britain and Germany, where cleaner forms of energy emerged through reasons unrelated to ecological policies.

Making clean energy cheap is key, Shellenberger said.

"You might pay more for that iPhone because it's a great piece of technology, but most people aren't going to pay more for energy that comes from clean sources."

What's the right idea? A trillion-dollar, decade-long investment in a clean-energy portfolio by the world's leading economies, according to Shellenberger.

Among the encouraging signs, in his view: Google.org's campaign to make clean energy cheaper than coal; newfound attention from Congress to support "green" jobs; the call in December by Nobel-winning scientists to create a $30 billion per year "Manhattan Project" for clean energy.

That's a pretty short list if Shellenberger is right about the world needing grand schemes within a tiny window of time.

The U.S. does not recycle nuclear waste from power plants because it could be used for weapons, but that might change.

Pete Domenici, the Republican Senator from New Mexico, said the country should start to examine the benefits of recycling fuel, according to the Las Vegas Sun.

France and most other nuclear energy-producing countries recycle fuel. Doing so cuts down the amount of fuel that needs to be mined, as well as the amount of nuclear waste that needs to get buried. Recycling, however, leads to byproducts that can be used to build bombs.

Domenici also said he wants to introduce legislation that would create more nuclear depositories, possibly in New Mexico. The Department of Energy has invested billions of dollars over several years in trying to build a repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The project, however, faces strong opposition.

No nuclear plants have been built in the U.S. in decades, but global warming, as well as higher prices for coal and natural gas, have revived the industry. An estimated 31 applications for building new nuclear plants in the United States are expected to be filed in the next few years. The applications, though, will likely draw strong opposition.

A few start-ups are also tinkering with nuclear fusion, which produces much less waste than nuclear fission, the basis of nuclear plants today. (Nuclear plants basically create heat, which is used to create steam to crank a turbine.)

We could put a bigger dent in greenhouse gases, says Patrick Moore, if it weren't for environmentalists.

Expanding the use of nuclear power would let the U.S. and other nations reduce dependence on coal, one of the biggest producers of carbon dioxide and other pollutants (and industrial accidents). Nuclear plants emit virtually no greenhouse gases, and more plants would also give the green light to the electric car industry.

"They (environmentalists) are the ones who are screaming that the sky is falling and that the climate catastrophe is coming and it's going to be global and it's going to cause 40 to 50 percent of all the species to become extinct and it's going to be the end of civilization as we know it," he said in an interview with CNET News.com. "And yet, they are against nuclear energy just because there could be an accident somewhere. How could one nuclear accident be worse than the whole world being destroyed?"

But here's something about Moore's background. He is a co-founder of Greenpeace. After he left the organization, he began to think about climate change and is now a very public nuclear advocate. He even works with the Center for Sustainable Energy, a nuclear trade group.

And, he likes to point out, he's not alone. Environmentalists and scientists like Stewart Brand and Jared Diamond are also pro-nuclear. Still, there are issues with disposal.

Moore also looks at the political and safety issues surrounding nuclear. Check out the full interview here.