interview
>
romm
> romm 28
Romm 28 (1:28)
Topic(s): Efficiency / Environment / Future Transport
User Comments
© WGBH Educational Foundation
Please watch the clip first. If you plan to use it, review
the Rules of Use, then click on the download button.
This clip is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Video Transcript
Well, I think there's no question that the human race in
general, and America in particular, isn't very good at
preventing bad things from happening. We're much better at
responding to them once they happen, like Pearl Harbor or
Sputnik or 9/11. So I think there is a very open question as
to whether we are going to act preventatively with global
warming, or we're going to have to wait until some really bad
things happen—sea levels rise, and the like.
The only problem is that global warming is different from most
other environmental problems. You can wait until a river is
polluted. I don't recommend it, but you can at least clean up
the river in maybe 10 years. If we start to see massive sea
level rise because carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere
for hundreds of years, there's no undoing global warming once
it's started down a certain road and crosses certain tipping
points that we're maybe 10 to 15 years away from.
So, you know, I think that— I'm cautiously optimistic
that there has been a sea change in the way people are
thinking about global warming; partly Al Gore's movie
An Inconvenient Truth, partly the growing scientific
consensus, partly the fact that weather has just been very
strange, and I think most people I talk to understand that. So
I expect people are going to increasingly demand action on
global warming, and the vehicle sector is probably the
trickiest sector to deal with, and that's where you're going
to need to see more efficiency and more alternative fuels.
