Interview with Terry Tamminen on Ring of Fire (Air America Radio) Nov. 25, 2006

[24:45 in the podcast mp3]

RFK: Joining us now is Terry Tamminen, former Secretary of California Environmental Protection Agency, and special advisor to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, my cousin.  Terry has also worked with us in Waterkeeper, and helped to found Waterkeeper programs up & down the California coast, and he's with us today to talk about his new book, Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction Terry —

TT: Bobby —

RFK:  Terry is a great personal friend of mine, I've known him since 1993.  Terry, Lives Per Gallon — mainly you talk about the externalities.  There's two kind of categories — the huge subsidies that we give to the oil companies, which I think most people are shocked at, like particularly these day, that the companies are making the richest profits in the history of mankind.  Why are we continuing to subsidize them and giving them free federal taxpayer money?

[25:33]

TT:  Well, Bobby, first of all there's really two kinds of costs, uh, as the title implies, there's "lives" and many other costs that are beyond our poor power to add or subtract, which — which we should talk about, but, when you get down to the dollars and cents, which by the way, work out to about  — seven or eight dollars a gallon, for every gallon, on top of what we pay at the pump, we're talking about as much as a trillion dollars every single year that go into subsidies of one kind or another, for — the richest corporations in the history of commerce.  And to answer your question "why?" I offer in the book two particular reasons:  first of all, oil & gas companies have contributed more than $186M to political campaigns in the United States between 1990 and 2006. 

And when you factor in what they have received back for that $186M investment, they've gotten back $1000 for every single dollar they've put into campaign contributions.  And not to make this a partisan issue,  but 75% of that $186M went to Republicans.  I suspect they would be giving it, as much as they could, to Democrats if the Democrats had been in power over that period of time, so, as I say, I don't really think it's partisan, but that's at least for the moment where that money has gone.

The second reason that I think they have been so successful in getting subsidies despite hardly needing it, especially when you hear that last quarter EXXON Mobil reported more than a $10B quarterly profit, the highest quarterly profit in the history of commerce.  But the other reason is because these companies have lied to the public, to regulators — having been a regulator I can tell you I was on the other end of the — of the smoke screen, and very, very similar to tobacco companies, for about seventy or eighty years, oil and auto companies have worked together, indeed conspired, and I use that term advisedly, because they were found guilty in federal court of conspiring to — lie to regulators, to do things like, they created a sham corporation called the National City Lines, which, methodically in the 30's and 40's went around buying up clean electric mass-transit in 45 American cities, and scrapped it in favor of their dirty diesel buses.  And we live with the legacy of that to this day, and the asthma and lung cancer and other health costs to this day, because of them taking away our alternatives.

So they've lied, they've conspired, they've used their political muscle, and again I would say acted exactly like tobacco companies, and the result is what comes out of the tailpipe, and what is harming so many of our citizens, is remarkably similar, chemically, almost identical, to second-hand tobacco smoke.

RFK:  You know, there's a lot of environmentalists out there, who for many years have warned that we're about to run out of oil, so that's the reason we need to look for other alternatives.  But Greg Palast says that that claim is a sham, and that the claim that we're about to run out of oil has been perpetrated by the oil industry as part of its strategy to raise prices by creating the illusion of short supplies.

[28:39]

TT:  Well, I go in to this in some detail in the book, and I would just have to respectfully disagree, because I — I think there is a practical limit.  But whether we're going to run out physically or not is almost not the question.  The other question which I go into some detail in the book about is that the oil companies, in order to artificially push up the price, here's where I do think they have conspired in that way — uh, they haven't made any investments in refineries in years.  And so, in California for example, in fact worldwide, we're at virtually 100% capacity of our refineries.  And they're breaking down routinely,  the supply lines are breaking down routinely, and that creates artificial shortages.  But the other point is, if you've got to go and kill people in foreign countries to secure your supply, that also doen't make it particularly sustainable over time.

[Break]

[30:30]

RFK:  Terry, tell us what the cost is in human health of every gallon of oil. 

TT:  Well, let me just give you two quick excerpts from the book, if I may.  And this is a quote: 

"Kids like me with asthma on ozone days I will almost always have an asthma attack if I go outside," testified eight-year-old Kyle Damitz.  "On good days, I take two pills in the morning and three pills at bedtime.  I do an IV treatment every two weeks.  On a bad asthma day I take four pills in the morning, and at lunch, and again, more at bedtime.   I came here today to ask you to help.  If you make our air cleaner, I will be able to live longer."

That's just one example of first hand testimony.  And cleaner standards for diesel-powered buses and trucks were ultimately adopted by the US EPA, but what we know is that 100,000 people die in this country every year from completely preventable petroleum-related air pollution; 6,000,000 asthma attacks, 159,000 emergency room visits are also directly attributable to that. 

And the other lives, of course, that we're spending, are nothing that we see — right here.  We are costing lives in places like Ecuador and Nigeria — you know, very often when we think about oil producing countries, we think about wealthy sheiks and — you know, Rolls Royces.  But the reality is — much further from the truth. [sic!]  We're impoverishing the people where oil is taken out of the ground, we're despoiling their landscapes, and oil companies are allowed to do this, and then just disappear into the night with their pockets full of cash.

RFK:  What do you say to people who say, "OK — we're stuck with oil — it drives our economy."  There's really no fuel like it, except for coal, and coal is worse than oil. 

TT:  Well, first of all I say, that's true.  Oil has definitely helped us over the years, to power our economy, to beat back Fascism and win a World War — I mean, there's no question that it has done some good things.  But it shouldn't be "at any price".  We need to be more educated, and that's the reason I wrote this book.  I'm hoping more people will be outraged by this and demand better.  And especially to stop the trillion dollars in subsidies that we're giving to these richest corporations in the history of commerce.  

RFK:  How much does that add up to a year?

TT:  Well, it's almost a trillion dollars a year.  It's $2700 for every man, woman, and child in America.  And for that kind of money you could insure the 45 million Americans that have no health insurance, and build 1500 schools in every state of the nation every single year.   Or, you know, you could send a check for $2700 to every man, woman, and child in America, and I suspect they would do something other than mail it to an oil or auto company.

RFK:  Now, Terry, I just had a personal question about this.  How the heck did you write this book [TT laughs] when you were supposed to be employed — in the government of California?

TT:  Well, everybody asks me that.  I had actually written 90% of it before the recall, when your cousin Arnold said, "hey, uh, y'know, I want to be a good environmental governor — come help me". 

RFK:  Give us the pitch on Arnold's enviromental record.

TT:  He is, I  — do believe, I'm not in state government any longer, so I can say this from an objective perspective, I think he's the most environmental governor we've had in the history of the state.  And in a very environmental state, that makes him one of our most environmental politicians ever.  And the evidence is, three years ago, we wrote his environmental action plan, and we've actually done virtually everything that's on that list.  We said we would tackle air pollution, and we restructured some of our car fees and things like that in California, y'know, to create a $150M annual war chest to convert dirty diesel trucks and buses to clean alternative fuels.  He fought off regulations that the Republicans were trying to push down our throats to take away our rights to regulate highly polluting two-stroke engines, and defended those laws, and has implemented many more regulations on — ships, and all kinds of other sources of air pollution in California.  We've got a 25 million acre Sierra Nevada Conservancy.  We've launched the hydrogen highway, and already have 30 stations in California, and hundreds of vehicles.  We launched the Million Solar Roof plan with a $3.2B solar initiative that's going to revolutionize solar and renewables in the State of California.  And the landmark greenhouse gas leadership, the climate plan, the most aggressive targets for reducing greenhouse gases, I think, in the world, certainly for any economy the size of California's, and not just political rhetoric, but the plan, the action plan to deliver on those goals, including our recently passed assembly bill 32 — AB32 — which takes those targets that he set and makes them caps that we cannot exceed over time. 

And the list is much longer.  I could go on and on.

RFK:  Well let me ask you this.  You had to deal with a lot of Republicans.  Now that you've left government, and you're prepared to backstab all those people, who [TT laughs] you were pretending to like all that time, are they really as venal and mendacious as we belive them to be?

TT:  Well, some of them are, yes — uhh — but that's the beauty of having somone like an Arnold Schwarzenegger, who  — I hope — and when my — my — I'm a Democrat as you know, and my friends when I was helping him during recall said, "how could you help him?  He's a Republican."  And I said, well, first of all, he may be your next governor, and wouldn't you rather that we're filling his agenda, rather than having someone else do it — y'know — the Bush administration who says the "Clean Skies" initiative, and it's all about pumping more pollution into the air, or the "Healthy Forests" initiative, which is all about cutting down trees.  You know, they make it sound good, and of course it's terrible public policy.  So I said, wouldn't you rather have Arnold, a Republican, have good policy, and then civilize that party.  Y'know, they can't all be like George Bush. 

And in fact, just the opposite.  I think that there are a lot of progressive Republicans out there who remember Teddy Roosevelt, and who know that this doesn't have to be a partisan issue, and that we've got, y'know, two more years of George Bush, but we can get past this and civilize that party and make them part of the solution in the future and not just part of the problem.